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This Week in Tech 1089: Robot Butt Crack
03:19:32
Anthropic Banned, But Winning
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A
It's time for Twitter this Week in Tech. Ian Thompson is here. Owen Thomas and Doc Rock. We'll talk about Anthropic. It looks like the Trump administration's backing down on its ban of Fable. We'll see. We'll also get some look at the financials of OpenAI. I got a little tip for you. It ain't good. And SpaceX's IPO, it's stratospheric, but how long can it stay up? That whole lot more coming up. Twit
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B
podcasts you love from people you trust.
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A
This is Twit. This is Twit this Week at Tech, episode 1089 recorded Sunday, June 21, 2026. Robot butt cr. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Hello everybody. Welcome back to one of the longest running shows in podcasting. And we have a fabulous panel ready for you from Aloha state in Hawaii. Mr. Oh, it says your real name on your Zoom thing. It's Doc Rock.
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C
Do you want me to. I never use regular zoom. I always use the zoom that's built into ecamm. Today I was just being brave.
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A
You're in regular zoom. So is it a secret what your real name is or.
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C
I don't think so, but yeah, I never use it.
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A
You just prefer the branding.
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B
That's his government name.
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A
Your government. That's right.
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C
Your government name. Government name.
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A
This is. What is it? The straw man name. That is Owen Thomas, who is from the San Francisco Business Times. Hello, Owen. That is both his real and his government name. It is, yes. And soon to have his own United States government name. Formerly of the uk. Ian Thompson. Hello, Ian.
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D
Yes, hi there. How's it going?
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A
It's going great. Your citizenship is arriving in the mail.
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D
Well, I have yet to do my biometrics and have the final interview, but they collect.
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A
What do they collect of your biometrics?
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D
Fingerprints, eye scans and a facial scan. And then I've got to pass the American history test, which having gone through very have been doing my revision on this. It's like I now I'm pretty much upstate on the U.S. constitution more than
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A
probably any American citizen.
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D
I was going to say, you ask the standard American how many members of Congress they are. There are. And you get a blank look in most cases. But you know, one of those things now I know it.
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A
I know there's 538 electors, but some of those are, I, I don't know. 528.
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C
535, 534, 535.
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A
That matters.
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D
Yeah, they. But, I mean, it's weird. Some of the questions are already weird. It's like, who wrote The Federalist Paper?
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B
538.
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D
No idea.
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B
435. 435 from the House.
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D
435 in the House. Yeah.
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A
That's why it's 535. It's 100 senators and 430 plus three
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B
for D.C. makes it 538.
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D
That's the elect until D.C. gets statehood. And maybe also Puerto Orico, which would be interesting, but. Yes, we shall see.
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A
Yes. Well, it's good to see all three of you. Welcome to the program. Two of us are wearing aloha shirts. Surprisingly not. Doc Rock, the Brit, is soon to be the US Citizen. Ian Thomas. I'm actually wearing a Mexican aloha shirt. I don't know what that would you call that?
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D
Well, I mean, I picked this up in Hawaii, which is where you've been recently.
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A
It's the real deal. Yeah, no, I have. When I was in Hawaii, I bought some nice Hawaiian shirts. But it looks like Owen and Doc are both fans of what we call in the United States football.
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D
Oh, wow. What Trump calls soccer.
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A
But I realize every four years I fall in love with soccer again. And then I forget all about it after the World cup, it's like, okay, back to American football.
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C
I thought. I thought Ted Lasso would get more people understanding how dope the game is, but I think some people just think that's like a show. But no, I mean, it's. It's. It's a good thing. And you're a.
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A
You're a play. You played.
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C
Yeah, I did play. I played all the way up until my knees quit. But I even tried to play in the old man league, but now my knees don't like it. But, yeah, it's a fun. It's a fun sport. I think a lot of people think that it's about, oh, like, what happens when nobody scores. I love when people say that. And I'm like, bro, there's so many games where there's lots of scoring. It really just depends on the tacticalness or whether you're saving players for the next game. This is a tournament, so there'll be games where you're definitely not trying to.
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A
I think Americans, we're so used because of football, we're so used to this kind of rigid progression of the game. Like, you march down the field and you march the other way, and then you march down the Field and soccer is much more fluid. It is a little bit more like basketball, but basketball, there's a lot more scoring.
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D
Yeah.
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C
Well, you know what? It is, too. People forget about the field goal fest. Right. Do we have field goal fest every Sunday? You know, back and forth, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And the whole total score, the game is six to nine. There's all field goals. Don't act like those games don't happen.
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A
Oh, football. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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C
Especially in the nfc. That's quite.
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A
We hate those games, by the way. We hate those games.
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D
I mean, I always love the Simpsons episode where they go to the soccer game and it's like back to so and so, back to so and so, back to so and so. And eventually a riot breaks out. And that was I. That's one of my favorite episodes.
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A
It's hard not to fall in love with soccer, though, when you're watching the World Cup. It really is.
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C
It's the fans, bro. You have to go see a real game. You got to see a real game. Singing and everyone must see a game. In Japan, I. I swear that the
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D
Japanese clean their stadium up after each match, which is fantastic.
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A
Well, they're taught that.
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D
I've got to say, kids, school kids don't have.
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A
They don't have janitors. The school kids clean the school.
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C
They don't have lunch ladies. Leo. The school kids feed each other. That's where you first learn how to be a communal. Communal.
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A
Yeah.
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D
The also shout out to the tartan army because they have won hearts and minds in Boston. I mean, if you're. If you're wearing a kilt in Boston at the moment, you're probably not buying your first pint.
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A
They didn't have a great game, but nevertheless, you gotta love those guys. And you're Scott, so. Yeah. And I have Welsh ancestry.
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D
I mean, I. I knew when I knew it was going to be a good one when the. There was a direct flight from Glasgow to Boston full of fans and they ran out of beer midway across the Atlantic. And also, all credit to the Scots fan who was interviewed by Boston tv. And it's like, yeah, well, we drank the bar dry. There was nothing less left. But Bud Light, we're not going to drink.
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A
Very nice. Well, anyway, good luck to every country. It's hard not to root for them all. And I really root for the underdogs. It's really fun.
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D
Yeah.
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C
When you see Cote d' Ivoire and
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A
you know I was rooting for them all the way, man.
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C
Right. Same with, same with. Oh my God, my brain just went down Cape Verde right when they, when they had their draw. That was just incredible. Watching people get their first goal in their nation's history kind of stuff, you know, just love that Dr. Congo or some dude on the thing said Dr. Congo.
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A
Dr. Rock says Dr. Congo.
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B
The bars in San Francisco are just going World cup crazy. And you know, the, the games are all happening between 12 and 9pm when the world cup was in. I think it was in Japan and South Korea. It was terrible hours for the bars.
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A
Now it's perfect.
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B
Yeah. And yeah, it's.
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A
And there is something about soccer that it's much better when you're watching with a group.
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C
Yes.
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D
Oh, definitely. Yeah.
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C
Yes.
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B
So they're, they're, they're putting up screens. You know, we've got the, of course the parklets.
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A
Downtown Petaluma is going to have a screen up for the US game this Thursday. So.
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B
Oh yeah. People are saying that if the US has a good run then it's, it's going to be really good for, for 100.
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C
Tourism spending the, the country road at the end of beating the Aussies, like was legit. As we say in Hawaii, chicken skin moment. Like, you know what? I, I'm one of those people, I like that song, but I don't like the song the way a lot of people like that song. My other half loves John Denver. But it's something about when that song played and we just won. I was like, people like, this is what I, I watch every Sunday, Saturday and Sunday, right? And just listening to that whole entire stadium scene together. We don't even do that in regular footy, you know, like, sorry, football, we don't do that. We don't have that thing where the team chance. And that's what I like about the game is, you know, when the whole stadium is singing, I, I'm going to hurt my feelings as a Manchester United fan when you hear those idiots singing you'll Never Walk alone and the whole thing is echoing through. Or you hear the hey Jude or you hear, you know, every, every team has their song right for us is it's. Oh, my brain just went dumb. I've been Glory, glory, Man United. When you hear that sound, it's just, oh my God.
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D
Glory, glory, man, you know, I hate it.
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C
It's incredible, bro. That stuff makes your skin like get the goosebumps. And so it was really neat to see that. And they even played it today in a non US game in Atlanta. They played country road and the Whole stadium is singing it. They're singing like our song.
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A
It's kind of hysterical. That's hysterical. Well, anyway, welcome to this week in World Cup. We actually have other topics, but we thought we'd get the soccer in first because it's going to be AI all the way down, I'm sorry to say, and I know some of you don't want to hear anything more about AI but, boy, it seems like there's always a huge story. The big story of last week was the Trump administration banning Anthropic's new, very strong model, Fable, which was a version of the Mythos model. It said no one can have because it's so good that it can find flaws in software that no one else found. And this would be devastating if it got into the hands of bad guys before it got in the hands of good guys. Anthropic released essentially Mythos with a number of protections to keep people from using it for AI research. Interestingly, maybe they didn't want any competition. Bioweapons research and cybersecurity research, and it was pretty good. But apparently an Amazon research team was able to do something they considered a jailbreak. They gave it some flawed software, some intentionally, some not. It found the bugs and now at that point it's supposed to stop. They merely said, fix this software. I can't fix the code.
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D
I think was the three words, fix this code. Yeah. Katie Mazuris saw the paper and went through it and she's just, it's just like this is not, you know, a threat to national security at all. So I suspect there's much more to this.
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C
The U.S. government.
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A
Well, let me tell you what Mike Asnik at Techdirt says, so fix this code. At that point, Fable said, oh, yeah, well, I can do that. And it not only found the flaws, patched them, it. And this is the thing that's deadly. It wrote a test to check to see if the patch worked. Now the test can check to see if the patch worked, but it also can be used on an unpatched piece of software to break it. And Amazon's research team said, well, this is problematic because it's not supposed to do that. Katie. Now they sent this to Anthropic. Anthropic sent it to Katie Mazuris, who is a very well known security researcher, basically invented the bug bounty. She set it up.
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D
Yeah, she, I mean, she convinced Microsoft and the Pentagon to actually start bug bounty programs rather than threatening to jail people that pointed out problems in their code.
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However, Mike Meznick says she is closely associated with Chris Krebs. You may remember, certainly the president does. Six years ago, Chris Krebs, who was at the time the director of CISA in the United States government, said the election of 2020 was free and fair. In fact, I think he said it was the most fair election in our history. President took umbrage because, as you know, the big lie is that it wasn't, and fired. Krebs has since, by the way, gone after him. They withdrew his global entry. They've been investigated. DOJ has been investigating him. The usual litany of ways that he can be harassed by the federal government. And Mike Mazek of Tech Dirt says it was Mazouris association with Chris Krebs that convinced the president that Anthropic should be shut down. He didn't like it that what he considered a Democratic radical, a radical Democrat, as he calls them, was. Was involved in this. I don't know if that's the case, but something else happened because at the G7 summit, Dario Mode, the CEO of Anthropic, went to the G7, talked with Trump and must have offered him something. My theory is he offered him 10% of the anthropic IPO, which is what OpenAI has already done him. Not really, but the US government, 10% of the IPO, something, or perhaps, I don't know, something, maybe the Pentagon, who continues to use, by the way, Anthropic models and in fact may have access to Mythos, we think. Some think. In any event, in an interview with Axios a couple of days ago, he said, well, I don't think Anthropic is a national security threat anymore. Something happened. Now he hasn't. They haven't backed down on the banning. I think that I was a little disappointed that the banning got so little coverage. We covered it, of course. I feel like it's a bad precedent for the US Government to ban an American company, American product. I don't even think it's legal. But to ban an American product. They banned it for use from foreign nationals. But the problem is Anthropic doesn't know your citizenship status. So the only way they can do that effectively is to ban it for. Is to block it for everybody, which they did. That is probably illegal as a Commerce Department order. But it's it. I liken it to. If. If Trump decided, you know, that iPhone is really security risk for us all because it's made in China, let's ban the iPhone.
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C
But Trump.
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D
Well, I mean, we good, huh?
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C
I said Put Trump phone. Now there's a phone you can trust.
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A
There's a phone you can trust. So I think it's a real big overreach for a federal, for the federal government without any. They didn't consult Congress, they didn't consult anybody. Just on a whim to ban an American product. It also causes huge issues because immediately people turned to, I turned to a Chinese model which is quite good.
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D
Well, I mean we've seen this before with encryption though.
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A
I mean it's exactly the same thing. Yes.
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D
Yeah, exactly. Which led to one security researcher actually getting code tattooed on his chest, which wouldn't make sense.
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A
There also was a T shirt which yeah. Because of the First Amendment was able to cross the border even though it was regarded as munition and blocked that ban. Didn't end well to the United States. They had to withdraw it. They told Mozilla for instance. Well, you can have 128 bit encryption in the United States but you can only have 42 bit encryption in the rest of the world. It just didn't work.
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B
No, you have to wonder.
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C
Never works.
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B
You have to wonder how much of this is getting ginned up by OpenAI.
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A
Well, there's a good question. Yes, who benefits?
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C
The same thing, Owen. And I was hoping somebody had good thoughts because I hate conspiracy theorists, but it always felt like that.
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B
The chief global affairs officer of OpenAI is Chris Lehane. Chris Lehane was the policy guy at Airbnb who masterminded all of those campaigns to keep these short term home rentals legal in the hometown of San Francisco and elsewhere. This guy's a mastermind. Don't underestimate him. Anthropic needs to staff the F up in Washington D.C. they need to do
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A
what Iran reportedly did, which hire psychologists in to talk with the President.
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B
Because I mean clearly like you know,
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they did, I think because it worked bro.
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C
They named the model Trump 7. We're good, we're back on. It's so dumb but I'm not even trying to bear to you if they name the model Donald Day Trump instead of.
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A
Okay, maybe that's what they're doing.
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C
Wait, wait, wait. I'm a Marcus 2.0 chat DJT
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bro.
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A
What has done besides you know their president Greg Brockman donated 50, was it 25 or $50 million to MAGA, the Trump's PAC. They have said we're going to give 10% of the company when we go public. We're going to give that to the federal government for its whatever sovereign wealth fund. So OpenAI has, absolutely. And remember, at the very beginning of Trump's presidency, they announced that. What was it, $500 billion? I forgot the name of it because it never happened. Stargate AI plan with Larry Ellison and others. And Sam Altman went to the inaugural. He stood next to President Trump announcing Stargate and this huge investment in the United States. They played the game. So for sure. But interestingly, OpenAI is rumored to have the next version of ChatGPT, I guess 5.6, that is equivalent in capability to Fable. Actually, as a number of people point out. Alex Stamus was on our show on Wednesday on intelligent machines. He created a free Fable.org website, which is a list of. It was an email. Open letter, I should say probably is an email, but it was an open letter to Secretary Lutnick and the Cyber Director for National Cybersecurity, Cairn Cross, saying, every AI can do what Mythos does. Mythos is not uniquely good at this. There are huge risks to the United States. It will stymie our AI development. It is not the way to do this. And, man, the signatories to this are huge names. I don't think this was persuasive, but
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D
Alex told us, this is ridiculous.
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A
This isn't good for us. This isn't good for America.
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B
Apparently, Dario Amod said the right things in, you know. Yeah.
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A
At the G7, we don't know what he said.
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B
You know, like personal. You know, there. There is a role, regardless of who the president is for, you know, kind of fobby CEO. Yeah. Like, you know, especially for the CEO to be kind of the face of the company now. You know, the. The question is whether Amade was this approach kind of over intellectual. Anthropic was founded basically as an answer to internal concerns among OpenAI researchers about this kind of issue. The safety.
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D
That's a lot of way of putting it. Yeah.
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B
So they tend to be true believers, and they tend to think that we are so scrupulous about safety, that our products must be safe because we're the good guys.
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A
What mischievous did he bring on himself by the announcement that Mythos was too good to be released to the public? I mean, he kind of set this all up, didn't he?
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C
Well, the funny thing is Fable, it has skeletons of Mythos, but it wasn't Mythos yet.
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A
It was not clear.
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C
It's not clear. It wasn't fair to call it Mythos Light. A lot of people were like, oh, it's Mythos Lights. I was like, no, there's still things about it. That they completely talked about.
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A
I don't think we know that, Doc. I think a lot of people think it's mythos with those restrictions, with the classifier.
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C
Yeah, okay. Yeah. With the orchestrator on it.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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C
I'm sorry, conductor. But yeah. I don't know. It's. It's one of those weird, weird things where again, I go back to, dude, we tried to do the same thing. This is a weird connection, but we tried prohibition with alcohol. Doesn't work. We tried prohibition way, way back with, you know, like, smashing before you get married. Never worked. We tried, you know, same thing with quote, unquote, the war on drugs. We've spent billions and billions and trillions of dollars in the war on drugs. Pro I. More people are twisted now than ever before, and a lot of it from the actual, you know, pharma company. So, like, this prohibition thing never, ever, ever works. And how is it that nobody in charge has figured out everything we've ever tried to stop doesn't work? And it normally leads to doing illegal stuff, which ends up costing us more money.
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A
I have another. I do have another theory. I wonder what you guys think. If you look at the polls, the American public hates AI.
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D
Yeah.
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A
And I'm wondering if Trump's thinking, this isn't. Remember, his number one job from his point of view at this point is to survive November, and he's not on the ballot. But if Congress swings to the other party, he could be in trouble.
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B
But AI is also spending big.
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A
I mean, and spending big. Yeah, but look at the polls, right? You were talking about a poll.
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C
Oh, yeah.
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A
That said that something like 61% of people didn't want AI in any of their products.
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D
Yeah. 16% said that they actually thought it was helpful.
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A
16. Out of 100.
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D
Yeah. Out of 100. Yeah. That's all there is.
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A
71% of Americans surveyed said, no data centers near me, buddy.
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D
Oh, well, I mean, the whole data center thing is fascinating.
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A
College graduates are booing at commencement speeches. AI.
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C
Yeah.
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D
Eric Schmidt looked absolutely gobsmacked that he was getting booed at a commencement thing. It was a glorious thing to watch.
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A
So maybe this is actually Trump putting his finger to the wind and saying, you know, it wouldn't be. It would be a pretty popular thing to ban AI.
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C
That's not where he puts his finger.
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A
But now, now
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C
it's. You know what?
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D
I don't know what you're talking about.
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C
The data center situation has been so overplayed. And I firmly, one of the Green brothers, I'm going to say Hank. Hank did on his Science channel did like a deep dive on like really how much water and stuff is actually used and how much electricity is actually used. And it's way overplayed by people who never really dug into it. So I think a whole lot of that to do with scare, that's not necessarily real.
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A
But also I completely agree if you look at the use of water of golf courses.
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C
Thank you. I live in Hawaii, trust me.
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D
Yeah.
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A
By the way, most. Some data centers recirculate their water, some don't. They use evaporative cooling but. But it's all of metas. For instance, data centers use recirculated water. So the water is not even. It's. It's not even being dis. But if on a golf course it's being sprayed and it's gone.
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C
One that, that's the one that gets everybody in because it's the easiest to kind of sort of understand. If you don't understand right, you don't have to know nothing about tech. You don't have to be a nerd. All you can do is say it uses up all the drinking water that started it and then it scared people. Oh, it's all electricity then that's legit though, right?
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A
Because electric bills are going.
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C
But how they got all the young people pissed off. This is how they got all the young people pissed off when the straight of Hormuz closed and some of the other things that was going down with terrorists closed and chips that buying for memory chips for our gaming computers where 80 bucks are now 4 or 500 bucks. Okay, now you get all the young people pissed off and they didn't need to know anything else, they didn't study anything else. They didn't dig any deeper. Is if I want to build a gaming machine or I want to buy a console or I want to do some of the cool stuff. I can't do it now because the. It's cost prohibitive already. Graphic cards were high in the first place because of mining but now graphic cards went really really crazy. And the only people that win this battle was Apple. And now they can't even win anymore cuz they got to raise price.
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A
I mean not GPUs but memory. Right.
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C
I was talking about, I was talking about memory as the first one. That's the first try buying everybody off.
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D
I mean look at the prices for for example, you know, removable storage. They're through the roof. You know you. It's five times what you would have paid a year. You know, a Year and a half
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C
ago, not even a year, a month
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A
or two ago, West Digital said we've sold every hard drive we can make through the rest of. Through the end of the year.
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B
There you go.
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D
Yeah, this is bonito.
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C
But so isn't that data center stuff, though?
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B
Isn't that because of data centers, they're
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A
buying up all the members, saying, okay, okay. That's what we're saying. But I pissed off.
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C
Yeah, when you talk to the public, they're worried about the electricity and the noise and, oh, you're going to catch cancer. A bunch of other stuff that, you know, hasn't necessarily been proven. So they're fearing them there. But the reality is, like, I bought a 20 terabyte hard drive in December for 289. I had to buy a second version a little bit ago, and it was 700 bucks for the exact same model number. Nothing changed on that drive, probably even manufactured at the same time.
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A
So we have some good reasons. And add to that that all those college graduates are going, where's the job going to?
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D
Oh, yeah, that's what you do.
- [25:54]
A
Learn how to do AI People are terrified, understandably. By the way, Apple is starting to beat the drum. For a long time we said, well, why isn't Apple, you know, raising its prices? Well, Tim Cook gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal. This is the beginning of what I think will be a campaign now through September saying Apple will have to raise its prices. Soaring costs make a price increase unavoidable. That's Apple preparing. You know, they're preparing the way, you know, they're saying, okay, okay, okay. Because coming in September, there are going to be some big price increases on the number one consumer electronics product, the iPhone. And so. Okay, so we see why the tide is turned against AI. So maybe the president is just saying, hey, I'm going to jump on this bandwagon. Nobody likes AI it's possible suddenly started
- [26:47]
C
with the tariffs and then you closed the straight of Hormuz. I mean, like a large portion of it is his fault.
- [26:53]
A
I know, but don't. Yeah, don't.
- [26:55]
B
Right. But if, if he can deflect the blame and, you know, make Silicon Valley.
- [27:00]
D
Exactly.
- [27:01]
A
And we are so ready to blame Big Tech, aren't we? I mean.
- [27:04]
C
Oh, yeah, because that's your battle. It's an easier battle. We've been primed for a long time to blame big tech for everything. And the funny thing is, what are you complaining about Big Tech on? Not a teletype, not a wise 2020 terminal.
- [27:18]
A
Well, I Think our audience, I would hope our audience. We're technology fans, I think. Yeah, I mean, I admit there are definitely problems with technology. It's not Earth friendly. Data centers aren't good for climate change, especially if you use natural gas to power them, as Elon Musk does.
- [27:40]
D
Oh, illegally as well. Yes.
- [27:42]
A
Oh, well, the Department of Justice is saying, you know what, we use Grok for our war.
- [27:47]
B
You.
- [27:48]
A
So it's. You can't.
- [27:49]
D
Oh, they're giving him a pass on that.
- [27:51]
A
Well, they went to the, they went to the court. Now there's a lawsuit going on saying that this is a violation of the environmental rules. The DOJ says. Yeah, but we're gonna. Your Honor, you should give him a pass because we need it.
- [28:05]
D
Oh, for goodness sake. Yeah, what happened to everyone under one rule? But no, that's another story.
- [28:11]
A
We're in an interesting world that we've created for ourselves. I don't know what.
- [28:16]
C
Okay, underwater data center, like completely underwater. Google.
- [28:20]
A
Google was doing those.
- [28:21]
D
Remember Microsoft four years ago?
- [28:24]
A
Data centers in space. That's one of the reasons SpaceX went off at such a huge value and he became a trillionaire because of this progress, this promise of data centers in space.
- [28:37]
D
You see, I mean, Microsoft tried the underwater data center thing off the Shetland Isles in Scotland about four years ago, and yes, it can work, but actually getting to upgrade it, you've got to pull the whole thing out the water in the first place. You get limpets and barnacles all over it, clogging up cooling vents. It's possible. It's kind of like the SpaceX thing. It's technically possible to put a data center into space, but nobody's got the technology to do it yet. And it's at least five to 10 years away. Plus you've got to loft the damn thing and you've got to have the bandwidth to send stuff backwards and forwards. This is why the whole SpaceX IPO, I read their S1, and it makes WeWork look optimistic when it came to that.
- [29:24]
B
The interesting thing to me about SpaceX is they're obviously a big government contractor and clearly they know how to kind of whisper in Washington. They're kind of a wild card, their AI revenue. The fact that SpaceX is in the AI business is just basically a recent accident of Elon Musk smashing some of his businesses together. X Xai and SpaceX have all gotten rolled up.
- [29:54]
A
Well, get ready, because Musk's. According to the New York Times, Musk's next move may be to merge SpaceX
- [30:01]
B
and Tesla and that's largely about chips because Tesla is building a, I think it's called a tariff AB in Austin. So that's the need for silicon design is kind of driving that consolidation.
- [30:21]
A
This, by the way, is one of the reasons he moved all his businesses to Texas. They were in Delaware. Delaware would have probably prohibited that. He also was pissed off because the Delaware court ruled that he shouldn't be getting a trillion dollar pay package.
- [30:37]
B
Well, that's a technical headquarters. But I want to point out Xai is actually headquartered in Palo Alto. And SpaceX in its S1 said that was because of the need for, you know, basically strategic recruiting. That's, that's where the engineers, the AI engineers are. And SpaceX just punked out $60 billion on a, on a San Francisco company called Cursor, which by the way, that
- [31:06]
A
SpaceX stock, which I thought was interesting. People didn't like that. I don't.
- [31:11]
B
Especially since it was a known thing. I mean.
- [31:13]
D
Right?
- [31:13]
A
It was, yeah.
- [31:15]
B
It should have been baked in, I think, I think that may have just been a pullback from, you know, a
- [31:20]
A
really kind of think about what they were buying.
- [31:25]
B
And if anything, SpaceX got a better deal. Right. Because the price was fixed at $60 billion for the IPO. The stock went up, which means SpaceX shareholders paid less as a percentage. They were less diluted.
- [31:40]
A
It was funny money by pure virtue
- [31:42]
B
of the stock going up.
- [31:45]
A
By moving to Texas. Texas apparently says it's very difficult for unhappy investors to challenge management decisions, according to the Times. So moving to Texas was kind of part of all of this mushing together of all of his, all of his companies.
- [32:00]
D
Well, I mean, fixing getting Tesla to join SpaceX. I mean Tesla is. If it weren't for tariffs, Tesla would be a money losing business because they produce very expensive, poorly built electric cars. And the Chinese can do the same for 40, 50% of the cost. If you look at what BYD, I
- [32:19]
A
would say all American carmakers are protected by that.
- [32:22]
B
Bang.
- [32:23]
A
I will point out. Right, But I mean it's an actual ban on Chinese.
- [32:27]
D
Yeah, I mean a friend of mine writes about electric cars for, you know, for his, for his living and he's been testing some of these Chinese cars and they are way ahead of what we've got here. Yes.
- [32:38]
A
Yeah.
- [32:38]
D
You know, I just came back from
- [32:39]
C
the UK and I saw some first, you know, up close and personal for the first time and I'm like, yo, these are way better than what we hear about on the news here. There's a lot of byd I Was going to say something else. There's a lot of BYD cars cruising around in uk and I was in London and Birmingham and I was, I was quite impressed by some of them. I was like, yo, this is actually a pretty decent car. So when you go to the Asda or the test. Tesco.
- [33:06]
D
Yeah, I was gonna say Tesco.
- [33:07]
C
Yeah, when you go to Tesco or Asda, you see like a whole bunch of them in the parking lot. So it's not even like they're not popular either. Right? That and man, we don't have BMW Mini wagons here. And you guys still have. I love them. I love BMW station wagons and we don't have them here.
- [33:21]
A
All right, I want to take a break. I am curious though, what y' all think about the notion that and what it would mean if the American people said, no more AI, we don't like big tech, no more big tech, no more AI, Then what would happen? Could it happen? Or would business interests say, no, sorry, we need it, we're going to do it.
- [33:42]
C
Yeah, I'll accelerate my house purchase in Japan. That's what happens. That is the fastest way to race to the bottom. I mean, we've already been capped by double fying education and trying to control things that we. Business controlling. That's already making us take our eye off the ball long enough to let somebody run past us. Turning off AI completely on some like holier than doubt thing. That would totally. We'll be done. We, we, we'd be now the word we're not supposed to use anymore. As far as world rankings go in the pits, I was doing the first, second and third.
- [34:20]
A
What do you, what do you think, Ian? Do we need AI?
- [34:25]
D
We have to have it. It's as simple as that. But it needs to be used responsibly. At the moment, we're in the hype cycle phase where companies are loving AI because that's what they've been told to think. What we need is responsible use of AI and above all, responsible use by employers and by employees. It's been used as an excuse to basically downsize large numbers of people. And excuse is the right word because
- [34:53]
A
that's not the only reason they're being fired, right?
- [34:55]
D
Yeah, well, no, because people overhied in the lockdown period. But it's a good excuse. But it's about responsible use of it and it's about sensible use of it.
- [35:06]
A
I completely agree. It needs to be regulated in some way.
- [35:10]
B
I mean, San Francisco is the AI capital of the world. Needs AI as An economic driver right now.
- [35:17]
A
Yeah.
- [35:17]
D
House prices aren't going to lose value by themselves. But no, it's.
- [35:21]
A
I can't understand the pushback against big tech. And AI really can.
- [35:25]
D
Yeah, because the whole thing has been mismanaged. You know, it's like AI has been hailed as this golden child which is going to lift us out and solve world cancer and the rest of it. And it's not there yet. It's not even close to being there yet, but it's being used as an excuse for all kinds of things. And I've got to say, a friend of mine is a teacher and she's really shocked by how young people are adopting this and just trusting it. You know, it's. They just. They will feed their homework assignments into Claude and get complete garbage back and just submit it without checking. You know, it needs to be used responsibly.
- [36:02]
A
That's a kind of laziness, isn't it?
- [36:04]
D
Yeah.
- [36:04]
A
I think one of the real concerns, certainly in education of AI is this is actually though, the story of technology. In many ways. I was thinking about this with my OURA ring is you start to rely on technology and you stop thinking for yourself. So with the OURA ring, I decided to take it off because I was using it to gauge how good my sleep was every night. And then I realized the real source of truth in this is how I feel, not what my ring tells me. Right?
- [36:32]
D
Yeah.
- [36:32]
A
And by focusing on my ring, I'm not thinking about how I feel. Same thing with education. If you let Claude do your writing for you, it's so tempting just not to do any thinking at all. And for most of us, writing, the reason you learn to write is it's a process of learning to think.
- [36:48]
D
Yes.
- [36:49]
A
And you'll never learn to think, which
- [36:52]
D
is what worries me about it. I mean, that's not a good outcome. I've seen we're already seeing in journalism, for example, public. When Chat GPT first came out, I looked at it and I thought, every publisher on the planet is going to be watching this and going, at last we can get rid of those pesky journalists. And the amount of slop that's generated by that. And not even, you know, for example, the largest local newspaper chain in, in the UK reach one of their journalists, put out 110 articles in a single day by using AI. And you're just like, this is insanity. It really is.
- [37:32]
A
Well, the good news is most people will read it through AI, so there really is.
- [37:36]
D
It's a loop talking to each other.
- [37:39]
C
It's like the old Siri Alexa memes when we first got those, you know, like, hey Siri. Hey Alexa.
- [37:45]
A
Yeah, they're talking to each other.
- [37:47]
B
Yeah.
- [37:48]
A
You know, I'm an AI fanatic. I love AI. I use it in every way. But I think you're exactly right that we, Ian, we need to, to think about how we're using it and use it responsibly. Yeah, I do worry about the environmental impact of it too. That's another you, you nailed, you nailed
- [38:05]
C
a couple of things. And here's, here's the, the two things I think about a lot because I really do have these processes. Number one, I'm like you, I use AI a lot, all the time. I absolutely love it. I'm having fun trying things, you know, written a couple apps that I'm playing around with. But I still do morning pages every morning because I learned that in college, right. So I still got my book out. I do my three pages. I write by hand all the time. But I also put on my headphones and I do my, you know, seven, 500 steps. I'm walking the block and I'm having a conversation back and forth with Claude, right. And I have it synthesize all of those raw brain dumpy thoughts and it puts it into like a set of notes where it tags everything. Reminds me of priorities. Because as ADHD person I can have a straight line conversation. I just don't.
- [38:50]
A
It's really useful if you have ADHD 100.
- [38:53]
C
So it's saving my bacon. It's reminding me of things that I need to do. Like the other day it was like, hey, you know, I have, I noticed you haven't talked about picking up your prescription in a little bit. Are you do. And I was like, oh yeah, turns out I got four pills left. I might as well go get that done, you know. So like it's, it does helpful. But I still write every day with fountain pen in my book, like you know, to process that muscle. But here's one thing that I think about when it comes to the environmental thing. If we put a bunch of agents on the actual papers and less of the people feelings and have it help us develop better plans to try to do some things. I think it could even help us fix some of the things that we're doing environmentally. Like, I think that it can help us figure out maybe what we can do with some of these crops that are, you know, overall better or for here it's, we're losing whole sides of mountains because we have so much Rain recently. I mean we're talking 800 year old trees just dropping in the middle of Waikiki. And it's like, what knowledge will we have? Should we change the grass around this tree in order to shore up the thing so it does get super wet? This grass absorbs a lot of water and then it will dry by the sun because we're sunny here every day and they don't have to worry about, you know, 800 year old, you know, 4,000 pound tree dropping in the middle of Waikiki.
- [40:11]
A
But couldn't you ask a botanist that? I mean, would AI give you a better answer?
- [40:15]
C
We have those botanists. That tree still fell.
- [40:19]
B
Sometimes I feel like companies will invest in something right now because it's labeled as AI rather than this is look at all birds.
- [40:28]
A
Which is now Smart bird. Smart bird. It was a slipper company. They decided that they're going to become an AI data center company and their stock went through the roof. There's smart birds briefly.
- [40:43]
B
Yeah.
- [40:45]
A
I mean that's a perfect example. Just label it with AI and everybody will be happy.
- [40:49]
D
I mean the thing is we know how to do this stuff. It's whether there's the will to do it and sticking AI in front of it might drive it forward. But we know how to deal with ecology up to a point. It's just getting the political and social and financial will to actually get it done.
- [41:09]
A
I'm gonna take a break. We have not answered that question definitively, but I guess that'd be a lot to expect on it on a podcast.
- [41:19]
C
We solved it today, guys.
- [41:24]
D
I think this thing's fine.
- [41:26]
A
We're gonna this the next few weeks will be interested. We'll be telling. I wonder what's going to happen with Fable. I have a feeling this week we'll hear something. And I wonder how the American people are going to deal with this threat of AI But I don't think there is an answer right now. Anyway. It's unpredictable. I wouldn't place a bet on polymarket if I were you at this point.
- [41:48]
D
Oh, well, somebody lost a million on polymarket. Win the World cup because they bet that Spain would beat Cape Verde. And it was a zero score draw.
- [41:59]
A
It was a tie.
- [42:00]
C
It.
- [42:00]
B
Wow. Yeah.
- [42:01]
D
And yeah, so they're severely out of pocket.
- [42:04]
A
Wow.
- [42:05]
C
Damn. That's terrible.
- [42:06]
A
Hey, hey, you know what? These companies, these, these casinos, they don't get built by giving you money.
- [42:14]
D
It doesn't work that way unless they're owned by the former. By the president.
- [42:17]
A
But yeah, there are some people who can make a casino go back.
- [42:19]
C
I wonder if that person who special on the draw or. Yeah, I wonder how much. Who put a TH000 on the draw?
- [42:25]
A
Who put the money on the draw?
- [42:26]
C
How much did they make? And I have to go and double check that.
- [42:29]
A
Yeah, go check that out. I want to know. We'll find out in a minute. You're watching this week in tech with doc rock from honolulu, Owen Thomas from San francisco. He's the managing editor of the san francisco business times. And Ian Thomas, who is where? Ian Thompson, rather, who is where? You were in the east bay?
- [42:46]
D
I'm in Richmond, California. East bay, yes. Richmond annex, as they like to call themselves in a rather pretentious way.
- [42:53]
A
We were driving by the chevron tanks down there and apparently chevron's about to withdraw. Will that change?
- [43:00]
D
They're shifting the headquarters, but the refinery will always be there.
- [43:03]
A
Oh, they'll always have the refinery.
- [43:05]
D
Well, I mean, I've, I've just finished. I've just become an accredited cert member, a community response team member here and yep, getting my ham license next month.
- [43:15]
A
Congratulations.
- [43:16]
D
And yeah, that was one of the scenarios they brought up. What if one of those tanks go, goes up? And it was just like, well, we'll do what we can, but chances are most of the city's going to burn down.
- [43:27]
A
Yeah, always interesting. Live in the shadow of a refinery.
- [43:30]
C
Somebody said that. You almost said neil nil and that would have cost you your u. S. Citizenship.
- [43:35]
A
He came so close, didn't he? Checked himself, said 00. Our show today, brought to you by shopify. I love the shopify. Have you ever thought of starting your own business? You know you have a great idea. Those are easy to come by, but those pesky little details probably stopped you. How do you charge people? Who's gonna design the website? How? Oh, here's a big one. I know Henry went through this with his salt Hank. How do you handle fulfillment? I have been there. I've watched my own kids with their strike, starting their own business. But you know what? They got it done. And you know how they got it done? With this shopify. I love shopify. Shopify, yes. When you go to salt hank, it's a shopify. You see that shopify pay button? Shop pay button there. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names like heinz and mattel to brands just getting started, like my boys, you know, salt Hank's salt lovers club. How about building the website? I gotta tell you, Hank did not have the skills But Shopify helped him build a beautiful online store. And here's the thing, it wasn't cookie cutter. It matched his brand's unique style. You can see it yourself. It's beautiful. And they can do that for you too. Shopify also helps with marketing. You can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And of course, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping, to processing returns and beyond. And do not forget that iconic purple shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com TWiT go to shopify.com TWiT shopify.com TWiT love that sound. See, we have not completely covered the AI thing, but I think we've done a pretty good job of it. You mentioned that OpenAI might be the beneficiary. Actually there's interesting, I saw a study that said actually Anthropic may actually be helped by the ban. That sales data suggests that because I guess people go, wow, it's that good that the government had to ban. Must be really good. And as a result, Anthropic's existing models, the Opus models, have been growing like Topsy. According to Ramp, anthropic's share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses rose two and a half percentage points in May to 41%, finally beating OpenAI, which had 39.5% of AI subscriptions in May, flat from the month. So Anthropic the the winner in May. Now remember, this ban happened just a couple of weeks ago, but there's, you know, marketing experts say this may be a good thing, not a bad thing for Anthropic.
- [46:48]
D
I think winning the PR rule, the PR war.
- [46:51]
B
Certainly every time they get banned, they get more customers.
- [46:54]
A
Isn't that amazing?
- [46:55]
D
Yeah.
- [46:56]
B
Meanwhile, people have heard about them. You know, every. Everyone's heard about chat GPT, right?
- [47:01]
A
Exactly.
- [47:02]
B
Anthropic has always been kind of like an inside Silicon Valley. Software engineers love cloud code, kind of secret vibe. And OpenAI has been kind of the safe, recognized choice and that's really changed.
- [47:22]
A
Meanwhile just sounds like your uncle.
- [47:25]
C
I mean it's a great, I mean I like the name because it's just, it rolls off the tongue Claude, but Claude just sounds like your uncle or your friend, which Was on point. On point. But when you're thinking of something that has like a tech name to it, right. We have all these something something metrics or something something Maddox or I this or you know, whatever. It's Claude.
- [47:41]
B
Just.
- [47:42]
C
It's.
- [47:42]
A
It's a better name. I agree with you.
- [47:44]
C
It is a glorious name. But it doesn't help for spreading the, the memeifying of it. Like turning it into a thing. Right. Even. Even Gemini is very futuristic.
- [47:54]
A
What do you think of fable and Mythos? I mean, those are bad.
- [47:57]
B
Better.
- [47:57]
C
Like those are better. Fable. I don't know. It goes back to Aesop. I don't know about that. But Mythos. Mythos I can get with.
- [48:03]
A
That's a good.
- [48:04]
C
Sounds like you gonna snap your fingers. You know, you got the.
- [48:07]
A
Yeah.
- [48:07]
C
Infinity Stones.
- [48:09]
A
But it is. That's what they should name it. AI Infinity Stones.
- [48:13]
D
And I am inevitable.
- [48:16]
A
Ed Zittran, who is a notable AI critic and has for a long time been saying AI is spending so fast it can't possibly keep it up. Got somehow got audited financial documents independently verified by the financial times of OpenAI's revenue. And according to these documents, they lost $38.5 billion last year.
- [48:42]
B
And you have to be. You have to be careful with those numbers because a lot of, a lot like the big chunk of that comes from their conversion from a nonprofit to a for profit.
- [48:53]
A
Okay.
- [48:54]
B
It's. It's complicated. They had this very complex capped profit structure that allowed Microsoft and others to invest in them even though they were a nonprofit. Those R and D expenses that you see a lot of that is actually revaluating those interests that eventually gets swept away by the conversion to a for profit. The other thing that you've got to. To keep in mind is their stock expense, which is not nothing, but it's a non cash expense when they give stock options or other equity to employees.
- [49:35]
A
This is why we have the business reporter on.
- [49:38]
B
Yeah, I mean most. Again, there's a lot of debate about it, but most Wall street analysts, when they're analyzing public companies, they kind of wave their hands about stock based compensation.
- [49:49]
A
And OpenAI did announce they now have a billion monthly active users. Or is it weekly? I think weekly active users of ChatGPT. It's certainly achieved market share. And a couple of months ago they made the largest raise of financing in history, valuing the company at $852 billion.
- [50:09]
B
But Anthropic has just leapfrogged them with a higher valuation of almost, almost a neat trillion dollars, which as a. As A privately held company. Unprecedented.
- [50:22]
A
It's coming public this year. Right.
- [50:24]
B
Or will they OpenAI? What Sam Altman has said to employees is that they've filed confidentially to go public, which is kind of a preparatory step and they could go public within the year. They might stay private longer. He said just because AI technology development is so fluid and there might be some, some benefits to staying private longer. I'm a little skeptical of that. I'm not sure what those benefits are.
- [50:52]
A
Rules about when you have to go public. There are rules about that. Right.
- [50:55]
B
The JOBS act weakened those rules or you know, weaken those rules or gave companies more flexibility. You know, the old rules had to do with the number of shareholders which was kind of a function enforcing Facebook to go public back in the day. I rem these days it's much easier to stay private for a long time and you know, as you can see, there's plenty of capital available to.
- [51:21]
A
Yeah. As long as they can raise privately, it seems like it would be better to stay private.
- [51:26]
B
Now we, we, we just talked about SpaceX buying cursor though and SpaceX is using that new public equity that funny as a, you know, as a, you know, it's, you can call it funny money but it's, you know, it's letting them do real deals.
- [51:39]
A
Well and it's also a stock based compensation is very valuable for getting the best engineering talent. Right. If you have a public stock, it's a little easier to use that.
- [51:48]
B
Absolutely. Because essentially you just keep issuing shares and diluting shareholders. Then you buy back shares if you have cash flow now that's a problem for these companies. But as long as the valuation stays up, they don't have to worry about that.
- [52:06]
A
One of the things it's difficult to
- [52:07]
D
believe share buybacks by companies were actually illegal until the 1980s and Reagan reformed the entire system. We could have solved a problem doing
- [52:16]
A
a lot of work in that sentence. That's a reform.
- [52:20]
D
Well, no, I mean intel spent billions buying back its own shares to support the share price and let chip manufacturing technology just lie useless and now they're paying the price for it. So I worry that other companies like SpaceX, Anthropic OpenAI are going to fall into the same trap.
- [52:39]
C
You remember back then too, like you didn't have, I mean CEO salary caps was kind of a thing, you know, it wasn't this situation where a company who's losing money and yet their CEO is making more. Right? Yeah. And so the guys that do it the way Apple do it are, you know, Steve And Tim did, you know, like, I'm gonna pay a dollar, but I'm gonna make my money on whatever the stock makes. Those guys all did really well. You know, they weren't as rich as. Or talked about as, but their companies tend to because they have a vested interest in making sure everything's moved forward. Back when. I always want to call him Randy Steve, When Randy Steve was running at&T. T was like scrubbing knuckles. But this dude was making 48 million a year as a CEO, like, really killing the blue ball.
- [53:27]
A
You mean Randall Stevenson?
- [53:28]
C
Yeah. I was so mad at him back in the day. But until. Until they got rid of him. Like, yo. AT&T almost tanked and he was making more. He was like one of the highest pace CEOs at that time. So, you know, every. A lot of stuff changed in 84, bro. Yeah, it's such a weird. A weird number, but I feel like our entire economy took a weird turn and we thought everything was gravy until somebody snatched it.
- [53:55]
A
Jeff Atwood says that 84 and all of those Reagan era rules changes were what really powered the income inequality explosion that we are seeing now.
- [54:07]
C
Yeah, I agree.
- [54:08]
B
Clinton didn't help either. Clinton didn't help either.
- [54:11]
A
Jeff Bezos is closer in net worth to you and me than he is to Elon Musk. The second richest man in the world is closer in net worth to you and me than he is to Elon Musk. That's how much more Elon Musk is worth.
- [54:29]
C
Okay, I need. I need Owen's brain for a second. Sorry.
- [54:34]
A
By the way, it is funny money, so you can say Elon's a trillion dollar.
- [54:37]
C
That was going to be my question.
- [54:39]
B
Elon Musk has better divorce lawyers.
- [54:41]
A
Okay, somebody.
- [54:43]
C
All right, so that was not the question. But Leo was closer if. If we had to put a real thing on it, like, took a lot of the funny money out of it. What does it really mean? Like, I tried to do it in my head the other day and I wasn't drunk and.
- [54:57]
B
Enough. I'm not sure this is a very satisfying answer, but if you take the funny money out of it, none of this happens. The speculative estimate that is fueling AI it just would not be possible without our modern stock markets. The willingness by investors to just believe in whatever Elon Musk or Sam Altman is selling them. It's, you know, it's so powered by belief and story and narrative and hope.
- [55:31]
D
Yeah.
- [55:31]
B
Yeah. You know, it's like, well, you wouldn't. You wouldn't have these Kind of like wild, you know, wild inequitable outcomes, but you wouldn't have the upside either. So, you know, it's really hard to see like any version of this that doesn't happen without the modern miracle and the modern curse of public markets.
- [56:00]
A
Somebody did the calculations. I wish I could remember, but for every dollar loss in the SpaceX value, stock market value, Elon loses something like $150 billion. There's some huge amount of swing and
- [56:17]
B
he has a compensation plan.
- [56:19]
A
That's crazy though. He's never gonna see that compensation package because it requires a million people on Mars. Among other things.
- [56:25]
C
Yes.
- [56:27]
B
Which, yeah.
- [56:27]
D
Which honestly is never going to happen.
- [56:30]
A
Everybody knows.
- [56:34]
C
The, the one thing that blew my mind, that story came out last week. I remember saying to a buddy of mine, hey, remember we were making fun of Elon for losing like 4,44 billion on Twitter. I'm sorry, nothing like he did, by
- [56:47]
A
the way, that was a good, that was a good investment, as it turned out.
- [56:50]
C
Turned out right.
- [56:52]
A
Not for the revenue of X, but the, for the power.
- [56:55]
C
Yeah, it was a power move.
- [56:56]
A
Yeah.
- [56:56]
C
He didn't know at the time it was a power move. I really don't think it helped him. That brilliant, his president.
- [57:01]
B
Yeah.
- [57:02]
D
Frankly, I mean, which he did from his heart.
- [57:06]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I like that.
- [57:08]
D
Yeah.
- [57:11]
A
You know, it's funny, I'm really torn on Elon because I have so much respect for early Elon and what he, what his goals were and what he did. And it's just later Elon that seems to be completely out of control. Among other things, he now predicts that by 2030, SpaceX's revenue will be a trillion dollars a year.
- [57:34]
D
Yeah. The S1 was fascinating reading because he was like, well, we need to get a self sustaining colony on Mars so we don't have all our eggs basket kind of annoyingly missing the fact that if you're born on Mars, you probably can't function on Earth because it's got one third of the gravity and you'd need an exoskeleton to actually walk around. You know, this is all pie in the sky stuff. And it worked. He got his funny money. NASDAQ changed their rules so that retail investors can, well, get ripped off, in my opinion. But you know, it's one of those things and we talk.
- [58:08]
A
I honestly feel, I feel like that people who buy SpaceX stock are being sold a bill of goods. That it's, it's, it's just, it's a meme stock.
- [58:21]
B
Would, would Mars give us the best basketball Players though.
- [58:24]
D
Yes.
- [58:25]
A
They grow so tall, be very easily injured. That would be the only downside. They'd be great basketball players in Mars gravity, let's put it.
- [58:33]
D
I'm glad you brought up Kelly and Zach's book because that is a must read for anyone interested.
- [58:38]
A
It's called A City on Mars and it, I mean, I'll give you the tldr. Can we settle space? Should we settle space? If we really thought this through. No, no and no. Then basically it is completely impracticable. And they list so many reasons why it's just not going to happen now. I think we should send robots to Mars. I think we should send AI to Mars because it could survive the flight. Its eyeballs wouldn't explode. You know, it wouldn't have to worry about cosmic rays if it were properly shielded and it wouldn't go crazy in the six month flight. There's a lot of reasons why going to Mars is not a good idea. And I have to think Elon knows that. Unless he's really high in fly. Matt Damon, famously motley, said fortune favors the brave. When he was doing an ad for FTX that didn't go so well that age like milk.
- [59:39]
D
Yeah, it was a wonderful interview.
- [59:41]
C
FTX commercials back in the day, it's super funny now and I see the people that were on it and I'm like, oh my God, you guys.
- [59:47]
A
They all got sued, right? Don Brady, pretty much, yeah. I think the court said no, they're not. There was just an ad. Come on man, just an ad.
- [59:54]
D
Yeah. Andy Weir had a one. There was a wonderful interview with Andy Weir about the Martian and he said the one thing. Okay, two things that which really stood out. First of all off the initial premise, the windstorm that blows away the aerial can't happen on Mars. But also the other thing was getting in and out of spacesuits because if you try and do that on the iss, it's a three hour process and then he just slips into this thing. Right, I'm going walkies now.
- [60:20]
A
Yeah, yeah. Actually I interviewed Andy and he said there are only a couple of scientific inaccuracies in this book. That storm on Mars is one of them. However, OpenAI did make a big hiring move this week. Two years ago, Google paid it is said $2.7 billion to hire Noam Shazir, Nobel Prize winner. He was the architect of Google's Gemini models. Wrote the original transformer paper $2.7 billion along with his team of researchers for Character AI a big aqua hire. Two years later he has now moved on and he's going to OpenAI, which is considered a huge acquisition for OpenAI. A big win and I think a big loss for Google. He wrote the famous paper attention is all you need that introduced the transformer architecture and by the way that's what GPT stands for is general purpose transformer. Purpose transformer. So you have to think if he got 2.7 billion from Google two years ago, what the hell did OpenAI offer him
- [61:40]
D
first? Daughters found in marriage? Maybe.
- [61:43]
A
Yeah, maybe, yeah. You could marry Sam Altman's daughter. I don't know.
- [61:47]
B
I believe all of Anthropic's co founders are still there which is kind of their claim to fame. All of the other AI companies, I mean, you know, like, like OpenAI has, you know, won this round but they've, you know they, they've lost people to, you know.
- [62:02]
A
Yeah.
- [62:03]
B
To Apple, to Meta. You know, XAI has been bleeding people. That's a big reason why they're, why they're buying Cursor is because, you know, basically they've lost a lot of their, they're technical co founders and they need to kind of restock the talent pool. I think we're going to see a lot more comings and goings especially as these companies go public and some of the early hires cash out and others are attracted by the public equity payouts that these companies can now.
- [62:44]
A
Yeah, going public is certainly, I mean that's what we were saying. That's one of the reasons why you, you go public so that you can,
- [62:51]
C
and a lot of these guys are taking their, their, they're taking their payouts and they're you know, going elsewhere. Right. Like it's, it's kind of a smart move especially if you live in the bay. Like I want to make sure that I, you know, finish paying off this house and do a couple other things.
- [63:03]
A
You could move to Liechtenstein.
- [63:05]
C
You can completely move. Like, I mean there's guys now who could cash out of this cursor move and like just step away from the game and they're squared well away for quite a while. You know, don't.
- [63:14]
A
I mean usually there are lock ins for the founders and this and the people that get acquired. Right. Of typically I think three years.
- [63:23]
C
Yeah, you want to be the op manager where like you can just take,
- [63:25]
A
yeah, you can leave us right away.
- [63:26]
C
You don't have to do anything. Take your stock and get out of here. Like see I'm, I'm going to leak.
- [63:31]
D
You're staying very quiet on this because A friend of mine is a co founder of Anthropic and a former registered journalist, so I can't say anything about it, but yes, you're right, happy man.
- [63:42]
C
I. I do wish. I wish one thing. I wish Anthropic would do better. And I wish more people understood the difference between HRF models and constitutional models. I think the reason why I went heavier on Claude than Open AI, it's not just even the crazy stuff that goes on in Open AI. I never even touched Croc. I. I'm mad that they took the name. I used to always say, oh, these people could rock this better. This would be.
- [64:06]
A
Oh, I know.
- [64:06]
C
I'm glad that they stole one of my favorite words, which I st from Christina Warren.
- [64:11]
A
She stole from, let's face it, Robert Heinlein.
- [64:13]
C
Yeah.
- [64:14]
D
From Rob.
- [64:14]
C
Yeah, yeah, of course. But like, you got. Don't. Don't just take a good word and ruin it. Dang it. Anyway, I wish more people really did understand the way constitutional models work as opposed to, you know, sort of human reinforcement. And I think that would go a long way to help. Even just, you know, this, this over AI hate is going down right now. A whole lot of it has to do with, you know, fear of losing jobs. Jobs for is really weird. The thing that we use to elect certain people by telling them that other people are going to take your jobs. And then, well, that's not working on smart people because they know better. So let's just scare them into thinking that AI is going to take their jobs. And I'm like, yo, people will always need human connection. So there's certain jobs that are never going to be taken. You know, it's really weird.
- [65:00]
A
Like massage therapists.
- [65:02]
C
Yeah. How are you gonna get Claude to fix this?
- [65:04]
A
Not acupuncturists. I guess you could have robots. Robots do that.
- [65:08]
C
I don't know if I trust that.
- [65:09]
A
Plumbers. Plumbers. You're not gonna have a robot Plumbers. Yeah, Plumbers.
- [65:13]
C
Have you ever seen a robot's butt crack underneath your sink?
- [65:16]
D
No.
- [65:17]
A
And you don't want it. You don't want it. And on that note, we're gonna take a break.
- [65:22]
D
Sorry.
- [65:24]
A
I think we have a show title, though. Thank you, Doc.
- [65:29]
D
Robot Crack.
- [65:30]
A
Yeah, Robot Butt Crack. I was gonna call it Limpets and Barnacles, but now I've got robot butt crack. I don't know. You're putting me in.
- [65:37]
C
Sounds like a good band, dude.
- [65:39]
A
Would it be a punk band or would it be a heavy metal? What kind of.
- [65:42]
C
I think we got to do 80s yacht.
- [65:44]
D
Rock, bro.
- [65:45]
A
Yacht.
- [65:45]
C
So it's so opposite of what it actually is, right? We get some Kris Kristofferson robot butt crack.
- [65:52]
A
Take me away to my robot. But crack. No, that. That's not gonna work. That's Doc Rock. He is a director of strategic partnerships at ecamm, which by the way, we are using right now and we love. Thank you, Doc Rock. We appreciate that. And of course you'll find him on YouTube and apparently a fan of the Japanese national team. Is that who you're rooting for in the World cup?
- [66:14]
C
Actually, no. 100% money is on Holland as it always is.
- [66:18]
A
They sure looked good.
- [66:19]
C
Way too good to not win yet. I mean, like the game played as it is played.
- [66:24]
A
Is that why you put an orange muff on your normally purple dude?
- [66:27]
C
I'm normally. Holland is my squad through and through. My first fell in love with the game from watching. I didn't know at the time time Johan Cruy from Pele play at RFK Stadium when he had the Diplomats versus the Cosmos. And I had no idea what I was watching at the time. But as I got older and I realized I saw history, bro. I saw Johan Crave and Pele play each other.
- [66:46]
A
Wow.
- [66:47]
C
I've been in love with Dutch national team ever since then. That was like back when there was eights in front of the years.
- [66:53]
D
So.
- [66:53]
C
Yeah.
- [66:54]
D
Wow. And some of the best fans in the business as well. They really enjoyed themselves.
- [66:58]
C
100.
- [66:59]
A
Well, the Scots give them a run for their money.
- [67:01]
D
No, no, the Scots definitely give them the run for the money.
- [67:03]
C
But with Formula one, Color of Insanity.
- [67:05]
A
Oh, yeah. The Max Verstappen fans are very much.
- [67:08]
D
No, no. I mean, I. A friend of mine went to the last Dutch Grand Prix and he said, seriously, if you get the chance, go there, camp out. The parties are absolutely epic.
- [67:19]
A
That's the one that's right on the ocean, right?
- [67:21]
C
It's a sand teasing Max PR on threads, bro. The Maxis came after me, bro. And like, oh. They're like, but you're American. You can't know anything about F1. I'm like, you're five, so go away.
- [67:34]
A
I know you are, but what am I? That's Ian Thomas. Who? Thompson. I keep calling you Ian Thomas. I don't know why. Maybe because English muffins, I think, But I don't know.
- [67:45]
B
It's my fault.
- [67:46]
A
He's my favorite English muffin. You're Owen Thomas. Managing anywhere in San Francisco business times. He's Ian Thompson. I don't know why we do this. We put you together all the time. It's just. I think Benito does it to confuse me.
- [67:58]
B
Me.
- [67:59]
A
Anyway.
- [67:59]
D
Oh, I don't know. It's quite an honor. So. Yeah.
- [68:02]
A
So tell your friend at Anthropic. I love Claude. I was very upset when Fable got turned off. I was right in the middle of a session and all of a sudden said, you can't use this model anymore. And I thought it was my credit card. I thought, oh, gosh darn it. I was rewriting the whole twit ad sales system.
- [68:22]
D
No, I mean, honestly, Claude for software is pretty. Is pretty good. I'm a fan of that.
- [68:27]
A
That when I have an issue, I go to Claude. I go. I go to Claude. Code. Yep. Yeah, it's good. They do a good job. Good to have all three of you here. This episode today brought to you by Simply cx. What separates the tech companies winning right now from the ones falling behind? It's not just the product, it's the experience. And you already know that gap is only getting wider. That's exactly what the Simply Simply CX podcast was built to explore. Launched by Microsoft and Hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experience leader, Simply CX brings you real, no fluff conversations with leaders from companies like CarMax, TD bank, and T Mobile on how AI, data and design are reshaping what customers expect and demand. If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode with Neil Iverson from TTech Digital about how AI tools like context gathering and call summarization are changing the way customer support teams operate behind the scenes. You'll appreciate how Simply CX goes beyond the headlines and gets into how AI is actually being implemented inside large organizations today and what's realistically working. For example, an airline contact center transformation was able to reduce average handle time by 30% while improving the experience for both agents and travelers, which is timely given this summer travel season. Right. New episodes drop every other Tuesday. Find Simply CX wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to tell them I sent you Simply cx. Customer Experience. It's all about the customer experience. And incidentally, it is the first day. Besides being the first day of summer, the longest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere, it is also Father's Day, at least in the United States. I don't think. Are you a father, Doc? Rock? I don't remember.
- [70:24]
C
No.
- [70:25]
A
No. We got no fathers except me on here today.
- [70:27]
C
Yeah, I like expensive things in traveling.
- [70:31]
A
You know what? You're smart. I love my kids. It was fun. Henry Called me this morning and then Abby called in the middle of the call. So I conferenced them in and I got to talk to both kids at the same time. And it felt really cool. Good.
- [70:44]
C
But now if yours can now take care of you. If he keeps slinging.
- [70:47]
A
Well, that's right. They're now in their 30s. They're full grown adults. And so they're not really my kids anymore. They've gone out into the world.
- [70:55]
D
They're always.
- [70:56]
C
You know what's funny about that story, Leo, is that, you know, in the old days, right, salt was all about money, right? Where we get salary and all of that for.
- [71:04]
A
Yeah, that's right.
- [71:05]
C
Yo, Hank just took it full circle. It's like, you know, kids are into bringing stuff back into the analog phase now. There's this like whole thing about, about vinyl and, and analog cameras and retro games. He's like, y' all gonna make salt money again.
- [71:17]
A
He makes, he cooks. It's interesting because he's done very well.
- [71:21]
D
In fact, I was gonna ask, has he done an in out burger? Yes, because I, I get a craving. I went, I went for, I went for one yesterday. But I'd be curious to see if he's done an in and out.
- [71:33]
A
You know what, his latest thing. I hope I'm not giving something away because he hasn't released it yet. Yet. But he's trying to learn to make. What is that amazing Japanese omelette. That's just perfect.
- [71:43]
C
Oh, dude, I could do that. I could show him how to do it.
- [71:48]
A
He's trying to. He's good. So he's shooting. So every morning he's making omurais and he's recording the efforts as he gets better and better. Yeah. And then he hopes he'll have at the end. Here's. You know how I learned how to do omorise?
- [72:03]
C
So that's actually the shape of the pan, Right? Regular American style pans will work. It's dorky.
- [72:08]
A
Yeah.
- [72:08]
D
You need a square one, right?
- [72:10]
C
Yeah, go. No, go on Amazon and buy him the one from Motokichi, who's the guy who's made it famous. You know, the, the. The sort of clown looking dude with the red hat. You can buy Motokichi special pot. If you can't find it, I'll find you a link.
- [72:23]
A
M O L T O K M
- [72:26]
C
O T O K I T C H I Motokichi and that. It's the shape of the, the frying pan. If you use like a 8 inch normal shape chef omelette pan, it won't work. It has a little extra roundness to it, but getting that flip over perfectly is the thing. And it has to have that right structure inside. He's probably in the better position because you want to use farm fresh eggs. Like storebought eggs are just trash nowadays. So if you.
- [72:51]
A
I can't find it on Amazon. Oh, maybe it's this.
- [72:53]
C
I'll find you.
- [72:54]
A
It's a square pan. It doesn't say moto.
- [72:56]
C
No, you don't want the square. The square pans is for making tamagoyaki. That's a little bit different.
- [73:02]
A
I. I come.
- [73:03]
D
You're in Petaluma, Leo. You must have access to good eggs, surely. I mean.
- [73:07]
A
But unfortunately Henry's in Manhattan. I don't know what the egg situation.
- [73:11]
C
Yeah, he got to get the, the up the upstate joint.
- [73:14]
A
Yeah. He. He has to come home to make his Motokichi Tamayaki. Omosaki Kakasaki. What is it called? Omokichi.
- [73:27]
C
He's this famous guy, his place is in Kyoto and if you try to go to his restaurant, like you have to book almost like eight months in advance. And we were in Kyoto a couple Christmas ago and I just happened to be walking down the alleyway and I look in the window and it was right by his restaurant and he just popped in the window. He's like, you know, come on in, doc. Yeah. No, we couldn't get it.
- [73:46]
D
You can't get it.
- [73:47]
C
I've been trying. I go to Kyoto every Christmas. I've been trying to get in. Still can't get in, like, but it's. It's kind of incredible. But there's lots of good omurice. You don't have to go to that one.
- [73:55]
A
Oh, here it is. From Kyoto, Japan, the ultimate omelet pan. Looks just like a regular omelet pan pan.
- [74:01]
C
Yes. The guy.
- [74:02]
D
Yes.
- [74:03]
C
Yeah. It's just a round omelette, slightly rounded at the bottom. And you want to find that. If you can get your hands on one of those, that'll help you.
- [74:10]
A
This is an Indiegogo. And look, they raised 2.2 million yen, which sounds like a lot of money.
- [74:16]
C
It's not.
- [74:17]
A
It's not.
- [74:19]
D
There he is.
- [74:20]
A
He's so cute. Kichi. Kichi.
- [74:21]
C
Yeah, He's a nice dude. Watch his videos. His videos are absolutely hilarious.
- [74:25]
A
He's adorable. He's a red.
- [74:27]
C
Yeah.
- [74:28]
A
Wow.
- [74:30]
C
He's like Ronald McDonald in Japan.
- [74:32]
A
I am going to send this right now to Henry and say this is what you need. Yeah. He, you know, it wasn't about money. For him, although it's turned out to be he's done very well. He said the other. A couple months ago, he said, I'm richer than you, Dad. I said, that's how it's supposed to work out. That's the goal in life. So happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there. If you. If you did a good job, your kids are doing better than you did. That's the.
- [74:57]
C
If you can't find it before December, let me know. I'll bring you one back. Oh, I go every December. Got to get away from this place.
- [75:04]
A
Christmas in Osaka.
- [75:06]
B
Yeah.
- [75:07]
C
Actually, this time I'll do Kobe and Kyoto, but Kyoto soccer.
- [75:10]
B
Like this.
- [75:11]
D
Now Christmas in Japan. Do you do the Kentucky Fried Chicken thing? Because apparently that's huge over there.
- [75:16]
C
Absol. Freaking Luly. And does wait. Better than ours. Absol. Frely. Oh, my God.
- [75:21]
A
You're the one who taught me that. You take a. A leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick and you put that in your rice cooker.
- [75:28]
C
Yes, yes.
- [75:29]
A
With the rice, of course.
- [75:30]
D
Good.
- [75:31]
C
It's.
- [75:31]
A
And it makes it. I have to. Now I have to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken to get one, though. Can I use Popeyes instead?
- [75:36]
C
I use any fried chicken from anywhere. Any fried chicken, whatever fried chicken that you get left over, even if it's the one from, like. What do you call the. The market, say, Safeway. Even the one from Safeway.
- [75:45]
A
Even the Safeway one. Yeah.
- [75:47]
C
You just take leftover piece of chickens and then even nuggets. I do like. And I go to. If I. If I get Rick Ross, AKA Wingstop, I'll put like, four or five of those nuggets with the rice. Game over.
- [75:57]
A
You have learned so much on this show, boys and girls. I'm glad you. Aren't you glad you, too?
- [76:02]
C
This weekend, Doc's cooking.
- [76:03]
A
Doc's cooking. Google. Speaking of Google, you win some, you lose some. In this case, they lost. They fought, though, and I'm proud of them. After the Republican National Committee and Democratic Party headquarters, they found. Remember, they found pipe bombs planted there after the Capitol riot. And in the investigation, the US Department of Justice, this is in 2023, in the Biden administration went to Google with a search warrant asking for. This was just unsealed just now, asking for all the people who had searched for things like pipe bombs, political things, that kind of thing they wanted, which would have been hundreds of search results. I guess they were. It's called a reverse warrant.
- [77:08]
D
Yeah.
- [77:10]
A
Or there's another one called a geofence warrant, which is right now in front of the U.S. supreme Court there there's a constitutional challenge against this. Google announced that in 2023 would no longer have access to users locations history so they couldn't comply with geofence warrants. I don't know. Is that true? Anyway, Google tried to fight this. They went to court because they consider this an invasion of their users privacy. So I want to give them some credit for fighting this. Keyword based warrants are a new area of U.S. law and the courts ruled against Google. The courts said no, you've got to give the Department of Justice that information. Google received geofence and keyword based warrants in the pipe bomb investigation. According to the records just now unsealed, it produced data about users in the vicinity of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee buildings in Washington. The company also was forced to comply with a warrant for users who searched for locations of the headquarters or the committee names paired with the words like security, camera, bomb and explosive. The data was anonymized however, so Google didn't reveal names or other personal information. By the summer of 2021 the company complied with the government's initial request to identify more than 250 users whose searches included references to bombs or if users repeatedly looked up the RNC or dnc. Two years later the government went back to Google with a warrant to identify more than 300 users who did a single search about either committee. So they complied. Google complied at first. This is all from Bloomberg. Bloomberg. But when it, when it came down to we want everybody who did this one search, Google protested that now you've gone too far. The potential harm, Google lawyers argued the potential, the individual harm to potentially thousands of innocent users wrought by the government's invasion into their anonymous political activities and associations renders the search unreasonable. And I have to say that sounds right.
- [79:17]
C
Right?
- [79:18]
D
Yeah.
- [79:19]
A
Government lawyers counter that Google couldn't vicariously assert the rights of its users against unconstitutional searches.
- [79:26]
D
Well I mean this really brought up to mind.
- [79:28]
A
Don't even know about it. How can they protest? Go ahead Ian.
- [79:33]
D
It's kind of brought to mind. You remember the Apple case in 2016 where the terrorist.
- [79:38]
A
The San Bernardino, whatever.
- [79:39]
D
Yeah, the San Bernardino case and Apple was that, you know, we're told by the government, government give us a backdoor to your operating system. They said no, Google was perfectly right to fight this. In my opinion it's a drastic overreach and very very bad for privacy.
- [79:53]
A
Yeah.
- [79:54]
C
It's also dumb not to realize that first of all the amount of data you'd have to comb through because when somebody hears something, people go and search it. That doesn't mean you're into it, right?
- [80:06]
A
Well, that's the issue is, is this, I mean this seems so unreasonable, questionable. You're right.
- [80:11]
C
And so once you open that, 99
- [80:13]
A
of those searches are innocent. In fact, all but one.
- [80:15]
C
And then once you open that door, you can easily chain a whole bunch of stuff together, right? Like if, if you had a thing where you know, one of your friends was visiting your house and you know she's female or whatever, but she brings a bunch of other friends with her and you're like, okay, I'm just finishing up in the bathroom, I'll be out in a second. Entertain yourselves. And you come out of the freaking bathroom, hair is wet, you're like doing one of these. At least walked in nine times out of ten, you knocked out dog. Like you didn't even do nothing. But you're done. I seen her. So like that's the kind of thing that's dumb about this is you can't just say, oh, somebody searched it, so they must be in on it too, like that. That's just crazy.
- [80:52]
A
So. So by the way, I'll give credit to Zoe Tillman, who is the law reporter for Bloomberg on this story. So Google did comply initially, but that final broad warrant went too far. In 2023, Google fought, sat in limbo for a year. In 2024, a federal magistrate denied Google's request. Google then challenged it. They appealed it to the US District Chief Judge James Boasberg, whose name you may remember. He's been very active lately in a number of high tech, high profile cases. In February 2025, he concluded the magistrate got it right and ordered the data from Google. By the way, they did make an arrest. I don't know. But unfortunately we don't know if the arrest was. The evidence was based on what they found from Google that's not revealed in the arrest.
- [81:51]
D
It just seems like an enormous lose though from an investigative position because if you have to go through, know 300, 400 people who actually search for these terms, you know, you might get the actual perpetrator, but you're gonna have to spend a hell of a long time going through useless information.
- [82:07]
A
Yeah, it's a lot of fish in that net.
- [82:09]
B
I mean that's, that's where AI comes in, right? AI makes, you know, diving through all this information, linking things up much easier in theory at least.
- [82:20]
A
Yeah. And I imagine that, well, I don't know know, but I think one of the things you could say, they maybe would take that data. Okay. Now we have 300 people and cross reference it against other information that they had that might have had 10 suspects. And then if they get a match there, now they're narrowing it down instead of just going through all 300 and saying, well, let's interview each of them.
- [82:42]
B
And it could increase these kind of maximalist demands for data because, you know, now if it is plausible that they can, you know, process it, they can persuade a judge perhaps that, you know, hey, this, this data would actually have benefit.
- [82:57]
A
Yeah.
- [82:58]
D
So now our freedom is based on chat GPT. We're all screwed. Yeah.
- [83:02]
A
What could possibly go wrong?
- [83:03]
C
Well, nowadays if the person is smart, like I'm not giving you any instructions, criminals. But if you're using something like Perplexity or you know, even the search built into your various chat bots, that's not your search. That search goes from a couple of servers. Well even be able to spin it back.
- [83:20]
A
Yeah. Although, and this is something we've been talking a lot about lately, it's become more and more obvious to me that all of the AI companies, including Perplexity, keep logs of everything that happened.
- [83:31]
C
Ah, there you go.
- [83:32]
A
And in fact are collecting huge amounts of information because not only are they collecting your name and your search, but they're correlating it to other things. Let's say you give Perplexity your tax return to say, did I calculate, calculate this right? They have a lot of information and all the evidence is that they're saving it. I had accept anthropic 30 days. Well, no, that's only for fable. If I can't remember. That was another fascinating. The people. People were very upset about that. But yeah, when you use these chatbots, in fact, I think it's. When you use AI in general, they collect a huge amount of information. All the information.
- [84:10]
B
When you use the Internet in general.
- [84:12]
C
Leo. Thank you. I was going to say web trackers. I tell my.
- [84:15]
A
The difference is. So if I'm doing a Google search, I type in a search result. So they now have your IP address and your search result.
- [84:21]
B
Yeah.
- [84:22]
A
If you're using AI, a lot of times you're prompting it and sending it documents and sending it other information, you're giving it much more than just a search term.
- [84:31]
C
Okay. But here's what, here's what, here's what Benny means. Right? I'm looking at the, the Daily News, right.
- [84:36]
A
Do we call you Benny Benito?
- [84:37]
D
Is that a.
- [84:38]
A
Is that a laugh?
- [84:39]
C
It's a. It's My old Philippines Filipino thing.
- [84:43]
D
I think.
- [84:43]
A
I think Benny probably doesn't mind, but I'm not gonna. Don't worry, Benito. I won't call you Benny.
- [84:47]
C
Looking at this with Bad Bunny in play as the number one dude on the planet right now. It's a good. It's a good name. It's a nice match. I'm looking at the LA Times on Brave right now. It says 43 trackers on this site alone. Just reading this article, Right?
- [85:01]
A
Good point.
- [85:01]
C
And that's just on a regular newspaper today. Something crazy innocuous. But I want you to try this just in case. Me, anybody who's using Brave, I went to cvs.com right? And I went to go order some Vaseline lip doohickeys, right? The plain suckers like this. When I went to go type it in because Brave blocks something on your site, all it did was go into a reload loop and it would not stop. You can't click anything. So that goes to tell you how much information, why I use Brave and, and Ghostery and things like that. It goes to show you how much information we put out there every day. And so all of these guys in the chat, they know we're all nerds. But when people like, I'm worried about my privacy and I'm like, bet. What do you use to block things on the web, Nick? Oh, I just use Microsoft Edge or I just use.
- [85:47]
A
It's not clear that you can do this from the AI chatbots though, right? Those are not. You know, you don't. You're not.
- [85:54]
D
You know, this is why I use tool. You know, I mean, it's Tour and Duck Duck Go. Yeah, that's the way forward.
- [86:00]
C
Yep.
- [86:01]
A
There is an excellent. EFF has an excellent page called cover your tracks where you can put your browser through a little check to see if your browser. Fingerprinting. See, it used to be cookies. That's so old school. They don't use cookies anymore. Now they use. As you said, doc, they use a variety of information that they get from your browser.
- [86:26]
C
Fingerprinters is the money.
- [86:27]
A
Fingerprints, things like screen resolution, what extra you've installed and stuff. And so I just did this in my Zen browser. And yes, it's blocking ads, yes, it's blocking trackers. But look at this. Is it protecting me for fingerprint? No, your browser has a unique fingerprint. That's not good. That means any site that does fingerprinting knows it's me. Exactly. Knows exactly who this is.
- [86:52]
C
And one of the bigger things that nobody really talks about let's just say all four of us are just super, super good, right? We, we keep everything down. We got it all tight, no problems there. But one of our friends in the friend group is loose with their stuff. All of our information is on their computer. Oh yeah, right. And so you remember when, when us Mac users always had the one PC friend and you would get the thing from there using outlook.com and you would get these weird spams. And you know, it's not from them, but it's their address. But they don't even speak in the right way that that person speaks. Like there's no New England access sent in this email. And it's because their mail was sending mail to everybody.
- [87:30]
A
Right.
- [87:30]
C
And you know, it was normally dumb PowerPoint slides, but that was the beginning of getting your name onto these lists that, you know, I'm using incog or to try to get rid of.
- [87:39]
A
We got fish. We got fished back in January because a client that we've done regular business with got hacked and they sent an email to us from his address, the kind of email he always sends asking for a request for a proposal. And it looked, I mean, it was the same email we get from this guy all the time. Right. Because the people, once they hacked him, looked at his emails, looked who they sent them to and made it look the same. And it had a link that you click to a document on Google Drive. And fortunately here in the house I have some filtering going on. So when we clicked it here, it just spun. Right?
- [88:21]
D
Right.
- [88:22]
A
Unfortunately, we sent it to an employee who does not have the same protections. It didn't spin. It popped up what looked like a Google login, which the employee then went through and filled out, including the two factor authentication. It was a man in the middle. The guy in the middle got all of that, passed it on to Google so that the interaction continued apparently normally, but kept it and immediately used it to log into our Google workspace. The funny thing is, it must work so well. They apparently got so much success with this, they didn't bother using their access for a few months. They looked at a couple of emails and then wandered off. And Google finally noticed it three months later, 121 days after this phishing attack.
- [89:09]
D
Good grief.
- [89:10]
A
We got a notice from Google that your workspace has been compromised. But all the forensics tell us that nothing happened because I think they probably have a stack of thousands and they're just working their way through them and they didn't get around to us. So we were very lucky. But that's exactly why this privacy is so important. Yes, it's an issue. It's getting worse. And I understand why, to be honest, the Trump administration would be scared of failing able because you put a tool like that in the hands of these bad actors, God knows what could happen.
- [89:48]
C
But it's funny, the people who say that stuff the most when you check them on it for real. For real, they're the most laxed about the security on other things that they don't realize that they give up on a regular basis.
- [89:59]
A
They use a signal client that's not really signal that records everything.
- [90:02]
C
Yeah.
- [90:03]
A
To the hard drive.
- [90:04]
C
Yeah.
- [90:05]
A
It's easily act.
- [90:07]
C
It's. It's so easy.
- [90:08]
A
Nobody would do that.
- [90:08]
C
I hate to, I hate the term virtual signal is so overly played. But it is in a way easy to virtu. Signal that you're trying to do all these things and it's like, but no, but you're.
- [90:17]
A
Well, that's why I admit, that's why I am admitting now to us getting fished. Right.
- [90:22]
B
Yeah.
- [90:22]
A
Because I think it's important to hear people say, no, no, this happens. And it happens to people who are very careful, who have a lot of security. And it still happens.
- [90:31]
C
And it still happens. Here, here's a funny one. And I, I wouldn't say somebody in the chat brought this up a while ago, but it's funny because it makes sense. We get so much information now about the administration and their, their AI stance.
- [90:42]
A
Right.
- [90:43]
C
What does dude post on his social platform basically every day, weird AI pictures of him being a doctor or riding a horse.
- [90:53]
A
Oh yeah, I was a doctor. That's it. And I'm like, no, no, it was a doctor to photograph. Oh yeah, I'm a doctor. That's it.
- [91:00]
C
I'm like, just listen, listen again. Listen to you. Like we want to be the anti AI. You know, it needs to slow down and you know, they're crushing us and then yet dude is out here posting AI crap on a daily basis. You know where I beams of former former opponents doing weird stuff.
- [91:17]
A
You know where I bet sales of VPN is going through the roof right now? The United Kingdom.
- [91:24]
C
Oh yeah.
- [91:26]
D
Okay.
- [91:27]
C
Okay.
- [91:28]
A
I'm looking at you, Ian.
- [91:30]
D
I'm getting ready for a runt on this one because this is not a stupidity.
- [91:34]
A
So Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the UK has announced last. Last week. Yeah. Well, he may not be Prime Minister tomorrow. And the poly market betting is apparently that he will resign tomorrow. Oh yeah, yeah.
- [91:47]
D
I mean it's, it's, it's had to come. He is a personality vacuum. He's done very little despite being given a huge majority.
- [91:56]
A
So this week has announced that by the end of the year the UK will prohibit under 16s from using YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok. They still can use WhatsApp and Facebook messenger, but they're banned.
- [92:14]
D
And how are they going to enforce this? This is the problem.
- [92:17]
A
Well, that's interesting.
- [92:19]
D
The only way to enforce it would be to require everyone using those services, adult or none, not to actually log in and provide a government issued ID in order to use social media, which is a privacy nightmare. They're not going to stop kids from using this stuff. It's. It's one of those ridiculous. I mean, Australia's gone down the same route.
- [92:42]
A
That's by the way, what everybody's saying. It works so well in Australia that we're going to do it, but it
- [92:47]
D
doesn't work in Australia. I've got friends down, down there and their kids are still using social media platforms.
- [92:53]
A
You know, I remember VPN sales went through the roof in Australia when they implemented that last September.
- [92:57]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [92:58]
D
And the same will happen in the UK as it did when they were talking about a porn ban. And honestly I'm, I'm iffy about the utility of VPNs because basically you're just handing your traffic to a single company rather than a bunch of them. But this is totally unenforceable. Yes, it would be wonderful if teenagers weren't on social media because I think it's very bad for their mental health.
- [93:22]
C
Health.
- [93:22]
D
But at the same time, just saying
- [93:24]
A
it's bad for grown up mental health too. I should.
- [93:26]
D
Well, true, true.
- [93:28]
A
It's bad for all of our mental health, let's face it.
- [93:31]
B
Yeah.
- [93:31]
A
And it's highly addictive, by the way. I was, I went to see a Bob Dylan concert last Saturday at the.
- [93:37]
D
Oh, you went to the Greek Theater.
- [93:38]
A
I did.
- [93:40]
D
Oh, nice. How was it?
- [93:41]
A
Berkeley? Well, it was interesting. I. Look, I'm a Bob Dylan fan. I. Last time I saw him was 50 years ago in 1980. 1976, when I was 19 years old. So I thought it was really cool to see him 50 years later. I don't know, I haven't aged at all. But he has quite a bit. He's 85 and he kind of sat the back of the stage behind a piano. I mean, it's wonderful to hear him. His voice is still there and his songwriting is still there and.
- [94:07]
C
No, one of the best storytellers in the game.
- [94:09]
A
Yeah. No one Expresses the meaning of his lyrics like he does. It's just brilliant.
- [94:14]
D
However, I'm glad his voice is still going, because we see order and their voices do not carry well after.
- [94:20]
C
Well, I mean, there was the age.
- [94:22]
A
He never had a great voice, so maybe that's why. Right. He just helps. He still sounds like this. He sounded like he was 85 when he was 20, so maybe that's why he doesn't sound any worse. But, no, I was thrilled to see him, but I think it was at his behest, because it is not the normal policy of the Greek Theater. There are signs everywhere that says, do not take your phone out of your pocket. If you use your phone, you will be ejected. And at the beginning, I loved this. It said, we. I think this is a Bob Dylan thing. We would like you to be present for this concert. Not looking through this concert through a screen and not forcing your people behind you to look through your screen. So we're asking that you not use your phones at all in this concert. Now, I know there's some comics, Dave Chappelle will make you give up your phone at the door, you know, but. So they didn't do that. But they were strict. But here's the interesting thing. It really frosted the audience. And people were sneaking their phones like crazy. They could especially. There were three acts so in between. And it was for all three acts. It was the whole show in between acts. People are going like this. People cannot go an hour without looking at their phone.
- [95:32]
D
I have to say, I can understand that. I was publicly shamed by Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields when we went to his Last Conversation concert. Because I was just. Just as he was starting off, I just tweeted a picture of him, and he stopped and went, there's someone in the front row using their phone. Just like, oh, that's me, right?
- [95:48]
A
What is he looking at? Twitter? And he had somebody backstage watching.
- [95:52]
D
No, no. Yeah, you see the light. Well, good for him. Like, I.
- [95:57]
A
You know, I have to say, after the fact, I thought, you know what? That's right. Let's be present for this and not experience it through, you know, creating FOMO in our friends and things. And how many times you go to a concert, guy's singing his heart out on the stage, and people are turning around with their back to the guy taking a selfie to show that they were at the concert. I would be so incensed if I heard the.
- [96:22]
C
If you want to show me that you went to a concert, do me a favor and just take a Picture of your tickets after. Not before, after.
- [96:28]
A
Don't. Not before. Because it can steal your tickets.
- [96:31]
C
That's it. Like, that should be the thing we should start. Because I also don't like it when someone's sitting there, like recording the whole thing. Because, you know, sometimes what are you.
- [96:40]
A
Who's gonna watch that video?
- [96:41]
C
Well, first of all, yeah, you watch it. It's not the whole thing. But the, the hard part is like, I want to know, like, what songs they're going to sing, right? I want to know did they bring out their good ones or, you know, what, what special ones we forgot about that they pulled out or whatever. And so when you're, you're kind of giving it away, right? Like you're kind of giving away. I wonder what the set's going to look like. Because I'm in, I'm in lighting and sound like, I want to know how they rigged up the flyers, the whole nine yards. Like, let me see that when I get there. Don't spoil Christmas. It's why I don't like iPhone leakers. I missed Leo. We had this conversation a thousand times. I missed the days of waking up on announcement day and being, ooh, now we're just looking for that one thing that leaks. Haven't already leaked, you know, and nobody comes back and says, we got it right. Wrong. They go, oh, well, we're disappointed because they didn't play this. Or we're disappointed.
- [97:26]
A
Absolutely. Although they. The Dylan website publishes the set list each time.
- [97:32]
D
So it though.
- [97:33]
C
But I mean, at that, it might be hard to stick to it.
- [97:36]
A
No, no, he changes.
- [97:38]
C
It is really.
- [97:38]
A
I think it's also to warn people he's not going to sing the hits. Don't.
- [97:41]
D
He's.
- [97:41]
A
This is. He is not a Bob Dylan cover band. It's Bob Dylan.
- [97:45]
D
Yeah. Right, with you, Doc. On the. Because we went to see Orbital at the Warfield and there was one bloke in the very front row who recorded the entire concert on an iPad, of all things, and didn't dance at all. And you're kind of like, what the hell are you thinking?
- [98:02]
A
I see that a lot at the local shows where people, there are people dancing. Because we go to shows with, you know, mosh pits, so you can really enjoy yourself, but there's always in the front, two or three guys who don't really look like they're enjoying it, just recording it, like that's what they do. Yeah, like that. Dude, get out of here. Go away. I, I absolutely. Anyway, back to the uk.
- [98:30]
B
I think that I think kids can probably do without social media. My question is, what about YouTube? YouTube is such an instructional.
- [98:37]
A
I think that's a huge problem.
- [98:39]
C
And YouTube is not really a social, social media, to be honest.
- [98:42]
B
Quasi.
- [98:43]
C
Right.
- [98:43]
B
You know, there's commenting, there's, you know,
- [98:45]
A
I think it's horrible to ban YouTube. Horrible?
- [98:49]
D
Oh yeah. I mean it's not a social media gold mine.
- [98:52]
A
It's like banning tv. Well, we decided and you know what they could have. Back in my day, everybody agreed. Newton Minow, the chairman of the FCC testified to Congress that television is a vast wasteland and they tried to ban it. Remember Mr. Rogers best name by the way, for power? Newton Minnow, Mr. Rogers. In fact, go see it. It's on YouTube. You ever hear that? Testified in Congress and saved PBS by talking about how important it was for the kids who watched Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and other shows. How important that was. He saved public television. So I could easily see that same mentality showing up here. Well, you know, it's bad. It's something we didn't have as a kid, so they don't need it anyway. Why are these changes being made? The UK government says well that's what you want. Nine out of ten parents back to social media ban for under 16s. Two thirds of young people agreed. What's changed?
- [99:51]
D
They're doing it the wrong way around though. I mean honestly, if you're going to try and cut this, cut this off. First off, don't allow kids to use their phone at school.
- [100:01]
A
That's the absolute great starting point. Yep. And I agree with that one.
- [100:05]
D
Yeah. But in terms of, in terms of the security aspect of this, if you've actually got a login using a government registered id, that's going to make a security gold mine for somebody who wants to break into the companies that are running these things. It's incredibly harmful and it just won't work. All kids will do is use burner phones and probably steal their parents driver's licenses and you know, go on. Not.
- [100:32]
C
It's just who would just let it happen anyway? So yeah, not going to work.
- [100:36]
A
Explain this to me.
- [100:39]
D
God, you're ask me to explain K's government.
- [100:43]
C
The answer is 42 Leo.
- [100:45]
A
They say it says so here in this section. This is the UK's the government's own website fact sheet. New rules to protect children online. Who will it affect? Children and young people under 16. Crucial they will still be able to access the online world safely for learning news games and staying in touch with known friends and family on messaging services. Are they asserting that the messaging services are all. I don't understand what, how, what are they talking about?
- [101:16]
D
This is the problem when you get government writing technology law because they don't understand.
- [101:21]
A
Should have used AI to write this
- [101:23]
C
before we got social media right. The number one thing you saw on TV about tech and Chris Hansen famously was creepers talking to kids on AOL and Prodigy and CompuServe chat bots. Well, Chris wasn't that far back, but the very first bad thing I ever heard about, you know, Texas coming to get you was stranger danger through people anonymously talking to people on bbs.
- [101:49]
A
Yep.
- [101:49]
D
Well that in the film War Games. Yes, yes.
- [101:52]
C
Like, oh my God, like, come on people, they can, they can talk to people on Messenger. That's, that's never worked. And, and just recently one of our home police officers but was acting as a, like a 14 year old boy and busted some high monkey mucks over here, you know from chatting.
- [102:11]
A
So what here's, here's, here's more. Will adults need to prove their age? Many adults won't need to do checks because they've already got an account that has been open for more than 16 years.
- [102:28]
D
So that's all.
- [102:33]
A
Or has a credit card connected to it. I get. Can kids under 16 not get credit cards? No, but you could be your parents credit card could be connected to your account.
- [102:43]
D
Oh yeah, somebody's wallet's going to get finched and they can just, they can do it that way.
- [102:47]
A
Or it could. It's linked to an email address that's age verified in other ways. I don't even know what that means.
- [102:53]
D
Honestly, that one baffled me too because I don't know that many email accounts which require age verification.
- [102:58]
A
Never seen one. Some adults will already have done age verification under the existing Online Safety act, so wouldn't need to do it again. And if not, well, it could be as simple as a facial recognition check
- [103:10]
C
for over 18 in 27. Is that why we have the new age verification here now? Because when I installed 27 it gave me some speech about age. I didn't read it of course, because I'm old, but yeah.
- [103:22]
A
So Apple has changed. Actually, let's take a break and I do want to talk about this because Meta is lobbying Congress. They're actually supporting the new COSA bill. But one of the things they like about it is that they wouldn't be responsible for age checks. Apple would, or Google would. The gatekeepers, the online, the app stores would be. And Apple is actually, I think, trying to set that up. Now to get ahead of regulation. But let's take a break and then we can talk about that. I'd like to talk about that. You're watching this Week in tech with Ian Thomas from the lovely Ian. God dang it. I blame you. Benito.
- [104:01]
C
Call him Emma Thompson. Let's go.
- [104:03]
A
Ian Owen, please. And Doc Ian, Tom's son, who, by the way, does a wonderful newsletter. And it used to be called Letter from America until Alistair
- [104:17]
D
Clark. Yes, we. We were Alistair Cook. We were Cook.
- [104:21]
A
That's it.
- [104:21]
D
We got. We got slight. It's now called View from the Valley. But yes, I like that dude.
- [104:27]
C
I like Alistair Cook. Just the name. Hi.
- [104:30]
A
Yeah, he used to do. So he used to do this wonderful Letter from America. And you called Letter from America to honor him?
- [104:38]
D
No, to honor him completely. But yes, it was.
- [104:42]
A
If you go to texinitiv.com you can subscribe to Ian's wonderful newsletter, View from the Valley. The shots, actually. Oh. Oh, you're gonna.
- [104:55]
D
Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm. I'm trying to start a podcast, but I've gotta say some of the software out there is a real bug. But yeah.
- [105:03]
C
Ian, listen, family, we about to fight, bro. I. I can fix you. There's a Software, it's called eCamm, turns out Twit Network, which is a really nice podcast network. You could do the whole thing by yourself.
- [105:14]
A
But he doesn't want to do video.
- [105:15]
C
Don't have to do video.
- [105:16]
A
Oh, ecamm. See, that's confusing about the name then.
- [105:20]
C
Yeah, which is why we took Live out.
- [105:21]
A
We took Live out, But it doesn't require a camera.
- [105:24]
C
No, no, no. And I would tell you. I would tell you record it with the video on and just strip the video because it is something easier about doing it when you can see when you go to edit.
- [105:32]
D
Edit.
- [105:32]
C
When you go to edit it, right? To see when you edit. And then at the end, you just output the audio only and send it. You don't have to do video, but just. Yeah, send me an email.
- [105:40]
D
Oh, ecamm. With two m's, right? Okay.
- [105:42]
C
Yes.
- [105:43]
A
And I want. I'll invite you. I just got into something that's brand new called Rebel Audio. I don't know if any of you have heard of this, but this is a highly AI driven podcast network. You still do the audio show. Show. But it. But AI then can do all the other stuff, which is kind of cool.
- [106:02]
D
I was gonna say I really don't want to do video because I've got a face for radio.
- [106:05]
A
No, I think.
- [106:07]
D
Yeah.
- [106:07]
C
I don't tell you why you want to do video right now. I'm sorry to sidetrack you real quick. The numbers on YouTube for video watching on television, it's actually astronomical. And now, really, YouTube has surpassed Apple and Spotify combined as a distribution network. Network.
- [106:26]
D
So interesting.
- [106:27]
C
With over last year, reported over a billion hours of podcast alone on television. Okay, so, Ian, your audience looks like us, right? You know, well, me, I'm the youngest at 60, but like us. And what happens is what we do is we put, like, I put Leo on. On Mac very quickly. I put it on in the living room. It's on the.
- [106:47]
A
You're still just listening.
- [106:48]
C
Yeah, but I'm just listening. But I'm walking and running Crown. And if it just so happens that Andy says, hey, buy one of this. I come into the living room and see one of these numbers like this.
- [106:57]
A
Yeah.
- [106:58]
C
And then I. You know what I'm doing? So I'm. I'm working a 3D printer. I'm doing something else. But those numbers from YouTube watching, it's true. Astronomical. And you being a researcher that you are, go look those up before you say not to do video, because doing what you're doing right now, sitting in front of your. Your books, just sitting there talking, you have to.
- [107:20]
A
You already have everything.
- [107:21]
C
You even have to look at the camera. It could just be the side of your face and you're still talking. But what you don't want to do is put your podcast on YouTube with just a picture that doesn't work. People.
- [107:30]
D
Okay.
- [107:31]
C
And people want to interact with the person because again, we lack the human activity. We. We lacking all this AI generated crap. So the. The idea of live streaming your recording, which I don't know where you would get that idea from, Leo. And then. Then taking the edited version and publishing it on audio, that is the bulletproof way to do a really successful podcast right now.
- [107:53]
D
Excellent. Thank you very much.
- [107:54]
C
And don't. Don't edit. Don't over edit. Don't do anything crazy like. And I can totally set you up just because we're friends of the network.
- [108:02]
A
And whatever you do, don't be a cat because.
- [108:06]
B
Oh, God.
- [108:07]
A
Or is it a fox?
- [108:08]
C
That's a fox.
- [108:09]
D
I was gonna say that's a fox. Surely.
- [108:11]
B
What does the box say?
- [108:15]
A
Whatever you do, don't be a cat. There we go. Sorry, I clicked on the wrong animal. Yeah, because that. Nobody wants that. Actually. You could do that, Ian. And then.
- [108:25]
D
Well, did you ever see the famous clip of the lawyer who had a
- [108:29]
A
filter your Honor, I am not a cat.
- [108:31]
D
Yes,
- [108:34]
B
speaking of animals, Fitz the wonder dog is fussing at me.
- [108:38]
A
Well, we'll let Fitz go because I have to do. Wait a minute. This is wrong. I have to do a commercial. And I better fix this before I do the commercial.
- [108:47]
C
That would be terrible.
- [108:51]
A
That would be kind of ironic, wouldn't it, all of a sudden? Because we have to send these out. I can, I think, oh, that's what you should do, Ian. Go with a mustache.
- [109:03]
D
Oh, no, that mustache was terrible because every time you took. Every time you took a swig. Every time you took a swig of tea.
- [109:11]
A
What's wrong with you?
- [109:13]
D
I looked like Ron Jeremy when I had that mustache.
- [109:15]
A
That's why we loved it. That's why we loved it. All right, now I will do a commercial. You go walk the dog or whatever it is you need to do. You're watching this Week in Tech with Owen Thomas, Ian Thompson and Doc Rock. I like it. Two syllables, very simple. This Week in Tech, brought to you this week by Ethos. It's Father's Day, you know, and I think one of the most important things that happened to me when I became a father was knowing suddenly I'm responsible. I'm responsible for this little family that I've created here. One of the very first things I did is go out and get life insurance because I knew if anything happened to me, and you never know, my family would be at risk. I think it's really for this Father's Day. This might be something for you dads to think about. And I want to tell you, our sponsor, Ethos, makes getting life insurance fast and easy. And, you know, it's easy because it's 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds, you can apply in minutes. You can get same day coverage. And here's something I love. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions and you can get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies as low as $30 a month. And you'll get your lowest rate from their network of trusted carriers. So take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free quote@ethos.com TWIT that's E T H O S.com TWIT application times may vary and rates may vary very, very ethos.com twit it really did. It did. You know, it's funny, when the kids were born, I was a dj. You work in kind of low paying DJ job. And it was just me and Jennifer and I figured, well, this is fine, but as soon as the kids come into your life, holy cow, your perspective really does change. And I'm, I'm very glad, very glad we did it. Although I will say to all three of you, because you don't have kids, you didn't make the wrong choice,
- [111:35]
C
put it that way. You remember that? It was like people thought we were rich, right? But I was like, yo, we get paid 750 an hour, bro, to, to sit here and talk on the radio or something crazy. But I will say free food and free drinks as about anywhere in town. Went a long way in a tourist town, I tell you that.
- [111:51]
D
Yeah, well, I mean, my mom, my mom was, I was talking to my mum for her birthday and she's like, you realize you were, you know, a overweight when you were born and also two weeks late. And I was like, mum, I had accommodation, free food, free drink. If you'd given me a TV in there, I would have been up there for another month.
- [112:09]
A
I would never have left the room. I know. Well, I, you know, I feel fortunate because my kids were born in 92 and 94. There it was, the Internet was around, around, but it wasn't anything like it is today. We did, they had like those CD ROMs, the learning CD ROMs, and they, they called it lapware at the time because you'd put the kid in your lap because you'd have to kind of control it and set up and, and that was a great experience. By the time Abby was a teenager, neopets had come out. I think she was maybe 12.
- [112:42]
D
Oh my word. That takes you back.
- [112:43]
A
Yeah. Remember, Neopets, they're actually, I think they're still around and, but I was a little nervous about it, but it was like MySpace. She learned how to make web pages. She really enjoyed it. And we had a little talk. I said, now there may be some adults on there pretending to be kids. You should really be careful about any information you reveal. And you know, and she said, dad, I said, What? I'm a 33 year old man from Philadelphia. I know better. Yes. I thought, oh, I guess I don't have to worry about her. She knew of course, intuitively not to reveal what school she went to, not to get in intimate conversations with strangers online. It's a little different today though, and I think kids are, I understand why, you know, it's the inclination of governments and parents to ban social media. Right now. Congress is considering renewing the Kids Online Safety Act Act. It's in, in committee in The Senate. Meta is actually lobbying in support of it.
- [113:50]
D
That's because they got the lawyers to deal with it.
- [113:52]
A
Well, that's, you know, it's called regulatory capture where you, you know, once you've got established, you make sure that the ladder's pulled up.
- [114:00]
C
There you go.
- [114:00]
D
Exactly.
- [114:02]
C
All the information they need to make it work, they already got. And so if they can cut the line now, they got the upper hand. Right.
- [114:07]
A
They've already seen the deck, they have been lobbling, lobbying. And by the way, when I say Meta, I think Instagram is the. Maybe you'd say TikTok, but I think Instagram is the number one culprit here in the algorithmic feeds. The way it is very addictive, the way kids use it. It can use it to, not only to bully, but to get body dysmorphia, body image issues, get the wrong message about life. I think Instagram really is, I mean, I can't think of another social network that is as risky for kids, can you?
- [114:42]
D
TikTok? Possibly, but I think Instagram is the worst offender.
- [114:45]
A
And Roblox, I mean, you know, but so I'd be very careful if my kid were on Roblox. Anyway. Meta's been lobbying lawmakers for legal immunity from child harm claims tied to platforms like Instagram. Using the COSA act, the provision Meta is said to favor would shield online platforms for liability, undercutting thousands of cases, including cases that Meta has already lost. Remember, Meta lost that big case in Los Angeles and that kind of opened the floodgate for thousands of other cases against Instagram. What Meta wants is to convert COSA into a liability shield. They are facing currently more than 2,000 active lawsuits by children, families and school districts and dozens of state attorneys General, Google and YouTube and Meta lost that LA trial and that was the trigger for all of that. Also, Meta got a big, I think 300 million plus sales settlement against them in New Mexico in a jury case. Yeah, it's not the money so much, I think for Meta as the risk of being shut down or restricted or an under 16 ban, which would scare them. One of the things they love about COSA is it would prevent states from creating their own rules. They'd only have to deal with the federal rules. And, and this is what brought this to mind when you talked about Apple. They would like the gatekeepers to be responsible for the age gates.
- [116:31]
D
Sure. They would, Yes. I mean, it's okay. It's America. You've legalized bribery and call it campaign contributions, but this is basically what it's coming down to Meta is scared stiff about having to ban people from their platform and therefore, yeah, let's get Congress to write the rules that we want.
- [116:47]
A
Yeah. And they have the lobbying horsepower to do it. But on the other hand, I commend Apple. At the WWDC conference last week, they announced, I think, some really good additional features. Many of the features they announced, by the way, were already in the iPhone. But they announced.
- [117:04]
C
They just labeled them and marketed it.
- [117:06]
A
Yeah, right. But one of the things they thought that they did that was new, which is very good, is they, first of all, they made it easier to turn on these child protections and they set up defaults, they said. We went out to the American Pediatric association and other experts in child protection and talked to them about what research shows. And we set defaults for the amount of screen time and things like that so that all a parent has to really do is turn it on and the defaults will be accepted. They don't have to spend a lot of time configuring it, figuring out, well, how much time should little Joey get online? They can change those defaults. But having those defaults in there, I think makes it a fairly simple thing for parents to do. They also created a website for parents to explain all this and to show what the defaults are and to help them try to make those decisions for their kids. And Steve Gibson's been arguing for this for a long time, saying, look, Apple and Google likely do know how a lot about you, right? And if you set up an iPhone for a kid and in that process you tell the iPhone this kid is 13 or whatever, they also have a mechanism, an API mechanism that Meta and others can use. It's already built in where they could. The application could ask what age group is the user in? And then turn off features or even block the application based on that. All of which seems to me to make more sense than having 100 different or a thousand or a hundred thousand different ways of doing it and each application doing it itself and having to go through that process. Why not just do it with Apple or just do it with Google and then let them tell the app? Doesn't that make sense?
- [118:53]
D
Yeah, I think the default thing is really important because, you know, it's been one of the bugbears of the industry that, you know, know, unless you set stuff by default, then chances are people won't use it. This was the big problem with, for example, two factor authentication with Gmail. Ten years after they launched two factor authentication, only 10% of users were actually using it. So set it up by default. And they have to. Oh, God, that's deeply worrying.
- [119:19]
A
Leo, you're looking at my Discord. I'll talk about it in a second. Finish your thought. I didn't mean to distract you too. Look, this is why we tell you look at the show, don't look at me.
- [119:31]
D
Also, I'm a black cat, not a ginger.
- [119:33]
A
All right, all right. Now we have to show it. When Owen comes back, I'll show him one of our great. We have a lot of people in the club that do AI. Pretty fly for assist. Guy does a lot of stuff. This is us as a cat. And look, even the wardrobe is great. Even Owen's headset mic is glorious. And it has your Japanese soccer.
- [119:52]
C
I think I'd be more like a British short hair, though, you know?
- [119:56]
A
Yeah, yeah. You and Ian are. Are orange cats.
- [120:01]
D
Well, I was gonna say Stumpy would be incredibly annoyed because she thinks as a me as an honorary black cat, but no, I mean it's. It is quite just. Actually, I. When I. Last time I was on, we were talking about Alan Turing being replaced by the badger on the 50 quid note and one of the readers on the Discord channel actually generated a picture within seconds of Alan Turing riding a giant badger. And that was just marvelous.
- [120:27]
A
It's amazing. Yeah. The AI has totally taken over our Discord Channel. AI and animated gifs. It's great fun. We love it. So. But I. I think this is a good idea. I'm sure Apple would. Doesn't want the liability, but on the other hand, this is a way to make parents. Parents feel pretty good about what Apple's doing, I think.
- [120:50]
D
Yeah, I'm just worrying about matter trying to legislate its way out of liability for bad actions. I don't think that's a good solution.
- [120:59]
B
I don't like.
- [121:00]
A
They are. So the interesting thing about. I want to protect Section 230. So I should say that up front. And that protects me. I'm not. I'm not worried about Meta or anybody any other other big tech company, but it protects me with. We have this Discord chat. We have forums@twit.community. we have a mastodon at Twit Social. In every case, Section 230 protects me as the person running the site from something illegal that's posted on the site by one of our users. Of course, I moderate and I take stuff down as quickly as I can. Section230 also protects my right, by the way, to moderate. That's Very important. So I'm not trying to say that. That a company like Met is responsible for every post on Facebook or Instagram. I think Section 230 protects them, and rightly so, there as it protects me. But I also think, and this is what the jury ruled in the Los Angeles case, that these companies have designed their algorithm in a way to make their stuff more sticky, more addictive. And that is a. So the jury, very cleverly, and I think probably it was the prosecution who thought this up. The plaintiff's attorneys who thought this up, say this is a defective product. This is not. This is not about section 230. This is about a company that's created a defective addictive product, just like a cigarette manufacturer has created an addictive product, and they should be liable for that. And the jury agreement agreed. Actually, the jury in New Mexico agreed. The judge agreed in Los Angeles. So I think that was the right thing to do. I don't disagree with that. I know a lot of people really were concerned about that ruling.
- [122:48]
D
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like. Do you remember the Foster Sester act, which was introduced. Yeah.
- [122:55]
A
Oh, there's the doggie. I didn't. Don't show the doggie the picture of you as a cat. He might get a little bit upset. I'm just saying.
- [123:07]
D
Ah, it's the wonder dog.
- [123:10]
A
That is not your owner as a cat. Okay, good. I'm glad he got his walk in on. That's great. It's amazing. The dog can't last three hours. I can. The dog cannot make it through the shutter. All right, well, we won't go three hours. We'll try to.
- [123:30]
B
That's true. You were in the chair solid.
- [123:32]
A
I have to be here. I have to do the ads and everything. So we're just talking about Apple's changes to the iPhone to protect families. And I think, given it's Father's Day, I think it's appropriate to think about this a little bit. I think they built this is their website for child safety, and it gives, I think now, I have to say. And our panelists on Mac Break Weekly, I think Jon Gruber said this. It really is kind of to get ahead of governmental regulation. Not so much to give the family something they need is to keep the government off their back. But I think this is where it should happen. And I think Apple is in a good position to do this. I think that's where you set it up is in the iPhone when you give it to the iPhone. And Google should do the same with Android, I have no problem with this. I think meta should be liable. I don't think COSA should be written in such a way that meta is not liable. But I do think section see, this sounds kind of contradictory, but section 230 is very important. So it's a complicated story. I feel like we're starting to thread our way through this one.
- [124:43]
B
Yeah, I mean I think the extent to which you can give parents real tools to help monitor and maybe control their kids usage, I mean the truth is a lot of adults need these usage monitoring tools themselves. But to the extent it's built in and it's kind of done in a thoughtful way, we know that kids are grabbing for their parents iPhone as soon as they, you know, soon as they realize that, you know, mom and dad are spending X number of hours a day with these devices, they just, they want to do what mom and dad are doing. So it's a reality.
- [125:27]
C
Yeah, and you're, you're right about the fact that a lot of it has to do as well with even some of the parents. Like I think that we should almost, it's kind of hard. We should have a tech literacy see push back in the country not only for the kids that are going through school, but even to readopt some of the adults who've already finished school, already finished college, everything. There should be a push where if you're going to make it patriotic, one of your patriotism things should be that you should become tech literate now because interesting, being tech illiterate is actually probably more dangerous for our national security and just about anything. But you got a whole bunch of people stand on their fake patriotism and they, they can't even open up their Microsoft Word good and like, you know, making decisions based on what's good for the country, not good for the country with a very low tech iq. And at one point it was like, well, tech's going to take over everything and take over our job. So I don't want to know that stuff. I don't want to do that. And then you know, those of us who dove in head first and we've always seen what the possibilities are and now we're almost fighting for it because of the fears that it's going to do more harm than going good. Well, a lot of the reason why misinformation works is because you're not tech literate. A lot of the reason why some of the other things that are bad for you as far as tech goes, doesn't work is because, well, you're not tech literate so like you're. Like you said when your kid was on neopets knew right away let me make my profile that I'm a 33 year old man from Philly she was
- [126:57]
A
tech literate, wasn't she? That was.
- [126:58]
C
I was impressed that was small so I've always fought for this this when it comes to my niece I've always told my sister in law that we don't have to worry about Emma because she doesn't have a low self esteem As a kid that grew up in the hood and watched, you know maybe
- [127:13]
A
that's the key, isn't it?
- [127:14]
C
And watch the kids that did bad the reason why I didn't get involved in all of the possibilities for me to get involved to when I was a hood is I was a high subs matter of fact I was cocky so kids with high self esteem are harder to get taken in by some someone who's trying to to convince them to do elsewise right. And even if you take it to the simplistic nature of getting grown adults to believe that some other adults are going to come over and steal all of their jobs that's an esteem problem bro. Because I tell you what I walk around ecamm like I'm not going to get fired because I know I do a good job. You know what I mean? It's possible like we could lose money and the boys could do hey, you
- [127:52]
A
don't worry about it.
- [127:52]
C
You don't worry but I don't worry about that because. Because I know a stimically I know what I put into the company and I know what I'm able to bring to the table and so we're having these conversation about the tech side but oh and to just add words to the fire are we doing anything to regulate sugar and all the other crap
- [128:11]
A
that's bad Guns in this or guns.
- [128:13]
C
You know what I'm saying? Like we're horrible this tech stuff but we're not touching the guns in the sugar which are probably more dangerous.
- [128:19]
A
Yeah, that's a good point. Point. The biggest cause of death among children now is. Is guns.
- [128:25]
C
Yeah it's really crazy and actually I want to give you credit Moose Espionage said it's not even just the tech leaders it's literacy in general because at some point in time and I think all of us, I don't know if we just beat it or we have better parents but at the moment we'll use 84 as a good number. I was graduating at that time but at 84, when we realized that kids that were coming from, you know, say lesser means were able to stand toe to toe against a quote unquote private schools where they went out of their way to make it so that their kids can have the leg up. And they started stopped investing into schools. And one of the first ones, I remember this argument full fledged in mid-70s was putting computers in our school. And the only reason why we got computers in our school school is because of where we were next to NASA. That a bunch of the parents who worked at NASA put the computers in the schools ourselves. And then they were like, oh, parents cannot donate computers to schools. It has to come from the board of Education. I remember this fight sh Groceries and we had a Commodore pet. Right. The ugly square trying to triangle top. Yeah. Commodore pet. That's when I got addicted. Was the Commodore Peter in about sixth or seventh grade. And that came from one of the parents that worked at NATSA in Beltsville.
- [129:44]
A
It's the case. Go ahead.
- [129:46]
D
I mean that's how Bill Gates got his start.
- [129:48]
A
Yeah.
- [129:48]
D
You know, the parents in his school organized a fund to buy computing time for the kids. And that's how, you know, Microsoft kicked off in the first place. I mean I'm, I'm slightly tricky about the importance of, I mean computers in school tools valuable. But there's been a lot of research recently that if you're actually learning from a computer, you don't remember facts as much as if you actually had to write stuff down. And I think you're still going to have to write stuff down to actually quite frankly, you know, I mean it, it astonishes me that computer. That computers are now to the point where you can write your university finals exams on a computer with an Internet connection connection. And that should be banned right off the bat.
- [130:36]
A
Harvard's bringing back provosts for their exams because they don't trust kids anymore. Not to cheat.
- [130:42]
B
Yeah.
- [130:42]
D
I mean there's no way.
- [130:44]
A
It's absolutely the case that a well educated literate populace is good for the economy, is good for the country. It is also the case that a well educated literate populace is bad for certain politicians. And, and if they're trying to hoodwink people to get them to vote for them, if they're trying to fool them with scare campaigns and scare ads, then having an educated electorate is not a good thing. I hate to think that that's what's going on.
- [131:17]
C
I hate to think that too. It sounded so conspiracy theorists. But more and more the, the what's the Word I want to say anecdotes is not anecdotes. But more and more, the. The circumstantial evidence just keeps stacking. Like, there were definitely things with adjusting the school boards. I mean, let's go to gerrymandering. That's an easy way to put it. Like, there was gender gerrymandering even back in the education system. And it's like, well, these kids can't get that smart because they get too smart then, you know, now we gotta, you know, take care of them or kind of situation. And the whole thing that again, I don't know why we keep on Reagan today, but coming up with the myth, myth of the welfare mom, like, that's just dumb, bro. Like, nobody's gonna have kids to make more money, bro. That's just really stupid.
- [132:01]
D
I'm kind of reminded of the old George Carlin sketch where he was talking about this, and he's just like, they want. They want people to be educated just enough to push the buttons and pull the levers. Not any more than that. And it's just like, you watch that from 30 years ago, and you're kind of like, well, that's was actually surprisingly on point.
- [132:22]
B
I mean, and the reality, though, is like, the. The AI. The AI Job effect is it's going to make jobs more complicated and require more education, more critical thinking.
- [132:31]
A
Yes.
- [132:32]
B
And, you know, to the extent it's not eliminating jobs, it's transforming them and raising the bar for what we need as a society from our education system.
- [132:43]
D
1.
- [132:43]
A
One would hope that every elected official in this country is rooting for this country to be the best it can be, to be the smartest and the strongest and the most effective.
- [132:52]
D
And in fact, this is the same government that actually added a journalist to a signal conversation about wars, about weapons strikes.
- [132:59]
A
But, you know, I mean, you know, I think in the best of all possible worlds, elected officials are there not to enrich themselves or gain power because they want to make the place a better place. And one would hope that that's why people are trying to get elected. We could disagree about what makes it a better place. I understand that, but we should all be wanting to make it better. It doesn't seem to be the case always. And those are the people you should not vote for. That's all I have to say about that. Waymo, speaking of mistakes, is now recalling its robo taxi because they're driving into highway construction zones. There are at least 13 instances. Now, Waymo is in San Francisco. Boy. Oh. And you see him Ever. I was in San Francisco on Wednesday. Every third car is a waymo now in San Francisco.
- [133:57]
B
Oh, I mean when I'm up early going to the gym, like it's me, it's me on a bike and a bunch of waymos.
- [134:04]
A
Do you feel safer with the waymos?
- [134:06]
B
You know, they do tend to stop more. You know what, they drive generously. Yeah, yeah. So like if they detect, you know, my presence on a bike, they tend to just reflect.
- [134:19]
A
I read somebody saying rifing a wayo is weird because they're over cautious in some areas and then they, they step on it, they floor it in other areas. Yeah.
- [134:29]
C
I want to know if Owen, if the waymo ever pulled up to a whistle and be like, look at those hams.
- [134:35]
D
I mean my mom was flattered. Thanksgiving, I mean my mum was over for Thanksgiving and I wanted to take her in one and she flat out refused.
- [134:43]
A
Just like, I'm not understand, I've never been one. I, I, it makes me nervous. I understand.
- [134:49]
D
I mean they're really safe. I mean I, I took on one Saturday night in San Francisco. Yeah, I know we're coming to that,
- [134:55]
A
but we're coming to where they're maybe not so safe.
- [134:57]
D
They felt really safe. Plus you can choose the soundtrack that you listen to. So in my case it was the Night Rider theme tune, but.
- [135:04]
C
Oh, there you go. I tell you one thing that every American should have to experience though. I had my first ride in the black taxi and oh yeah, we were going from, going from Waterloo to Heathrow. Right. It's kind of an expensive trip.
- [135:18]
A
Oh, oh, the London cab, it was easier.
- [135:20]
C
Yeah, well, it turns out having a flight move, actually we didn't. I flew on Sunday, but moving from Waterloo to Heathrow on a Saturday during football, Dumb, okay? Very, very dumb. But the way that this guy knew every single back road. When I found myself in Kent, I'm like, why the heck am I in Kent? Well, because according to Google Maps, if you went on the freeway, you'd be done. Because by the time you come out by the gtech stadium where Brenford played, like there was just a lot of traffic at that time. Right?
- [135:49]
D
Because no, I mean, London taxi drivers do a thing called the Knowledge, which is a five year year test.
- [135:55]
C
That's three, but it's five.
- [135:57]
D
Yeah.
- [135:58]
C
Oh my God, it was brilliant. It was.
- [136:00]
A
What do they have to know in the Knowledge?
- [136:02]
C
Everything.
- [136:02]
D
Every single road in London. I mean literally.
- [136:06]
A
So they have Google Maps in their brain basically.
- [136:08]
C
In their brain?
- [136:09]
D
Pretty much, yeah.
- [136:10]
C
Yes.
- [136:10]
D
I mean there's a reason why they get paid Sunday.
- [136:13]
C
I'm sorry, you understand on a Saturday or Sunday when there's game time, like of course, when the stadium's getting out, like everything is messed up. Right. So all the stations, all you saw literally there in the premier side, there's six teams if you count the Thunder teams. Like there's almost 20 teams in London proper. Right. And so when everybody's playing on a Saturday towards the end of the season, it's a mad house. And yet it was just, it was like, it was like butter, bro. And there was a UFC fight that night as well. So this guy just got through traffic like nobody and everybody should experience it at least once.
- [136:45]
A
How well did they get paid?
- [136:47]
D
They basically they're self, they self employed, so.
- [136:51]
A
But it's good money, that's what you're saying? Saying?
- [136:53]
D
Yeah, it's, it's, I mean it's, it's, it's very good money and they defend it quite. I remember when Uber launched in London and taxi drivers didn't protest about it. They just went around to the Uber office and completely trashed it. They, they, they knew the way to
- [137:10]
A
the Uber office, which was really impressive.
- [137:12]
C
Yeah, the taxi was better than Uber. Uber was Dookie and so was Bolt. I didn't really like Bolt, but just, just do the taxi. It's better. Better.
- [137:20]
A
So what about self driving vehicles? Are there self driving vehicles in the uk?
- [137:23]
D
WAYO is, is launching in London this year.
- [137:26]
C
Yeah, I saw them testing.
- [137:28]
D
Yeah, they're, they're running tests at the moment.
- [137:30]
A
An Uber driver may not know every road, it may not have the knowledge, but we know the Wayo does, right?
- [137:36]
D
Yeah. I mean I'm a little bit concerned because Waymos have an awful lot of very expensive hardware in easily smashable places on the outside of the car. And I get the feeling a couple of London cab drivers are going to have have a take a more direct action approach against the competition.
- [137:52]
A
That'll be interesting. So it's not the first time Waymo has been yanked. So what they do is they slowly expand its capabilities. It was only recently they allowed Waymos on the freeway at all. Right.
- [138:04]
D
Yeah.
- [138:04]
A
Unfortunately, since they did that, there have been 13 instances of robo taxis driving into highway sections that were closed for construction. You know, lights, barricades, barriers, all of that stuff, they go plow right through it. Six of them were in Phoenix, Arizona in April. Seven occurred in San Francisco in May. So May 19, Waymo pulled all its robo taxis from highways and they are working on a Fix. So the Waymos are still going, but they're only on city streets. It's not the first time they've done this, you may remember. In fact, it's the sixth time. You may remember. Waymo recalled its robo taxis after the. They kept driving into flooded roads. Yeah. In December they had a recall to address the vehicle's illegal behavior around school buses. Low speed collisions with chains and gates and telephone poles have been a problem. And there was another one solving a problem regarding towed trucks.
- [139:05]
D
I mean on the plus side, they haven't killed anyone yet. It's not like this is the Uber self driving car which actually kills people.
- [139:10]
C
A cat.
- [139:11]
A
They killed a cat.
- [139:12]
D
Oh yes, the. The bodega cat.
- [139:14]
A
Cat.
- [139:15]
B
Much mourned beloved cat.
- [139:16]
A
Yeah, yeah. I actually think they have killed one pedestrian in Phoenix. Did they not? Was that Wayo or. Oh no, that was gm. That was the. That was the General Motors cruise.
- [139:26]
B
Cruise. No, Uber. Uber killed.
- [139:28]
D
That was Uber, I think.
- [139:29]
A
Okay. Yeah.
- [139:31]
B
With a test driver in the car. I should.
- [139:33]
A
Right, yeah, it's true.
- [139:34]
D
Who's actually parked on someone after they. Not after they drowned them.
- [139:37]
A
That was. That was another. Didn't kill him. So that's the good ish news. Waymo says they've driven more than 170 miles autonomously. They have demonstrated a 13 times reduction in serious injury or worse crashes when compared to human drivers. I believe that. I mean humans are terrible drivers.
- [139:59]
D
I mean I used to work in Embarcadero and you just looked out the window and you would see as you pointed out out Owen, three or four Waymos just circulating around. So I'm not sure they actually cut down on traffic per se, but they're certainly safer than human drivers. And I've got a friend who also cycles in the city and he says he feels a lot more comfortable having a Waymo coming up behind him than he does a human driver.
- [140:21]
A
You at least know it's paying attention. The human driver may not be. Waymo is going to launch in 20 more cities this year including London and Tokyo. So there.
- [140:31]
D
Tokyo is going to be.
- [140:32]
C
Will be, will be in a way good, but not in the major parts like in the outside side of streets. I think it will be good because people are very good about not, not being in the streets during the crosswalk and things of that nature. For instance, here in Hawaii it is like a 400 and something dollar fine to enter the crosswalk once the numbers start counting. Right. You're not supposed to enter once the numbers start counting. You know what everybody does as soon as they see the number, they try to run across the street. You know what else we have a lot of in Honolulu? People over the ages of 70. Because that's where you, you make your money. You come here to retire, Leo, wink, wink. I got a couple spots open in my building, dude. I see dudes enter the street. The number's on seven. And I'm like, yo papa, you cannot make that crossing in seven seconds, dog. So now everybody is waiting and the people in Tokyo just don't do that. So I think it might be okay in Tokyo, but those side streets are really skinny, bro. They're tiny. Tiny.
- [141:26]
D
Same in London. I mean there's a lot of streets down there that are just like. I remember when there was a lot of talk about people in London buying wank tax, sorry, cyber trucks and getting. Trying to get one of those down a London street is just impossible. And in fact, they're illegal in the UK because they're not built cyber trucks.
- [141:49]
A
The Tesla cybertruck America is illegal in the uk.
- [141:52]
D
They're illegal in, in UK and Europe because to wide. Well, no, it's not, it's not that. It's. They're not built for pedestrian crashes. So under EU and UK law, you have to have the car designed in such a way as to minimize the chance of a pedestrian getting hit by. Well, if a pedestrian gets hit by one, they're not going to get killed. So you have rounded fronts. If you're familiar with the Mazda Miata, they used to have pop up headlights. Those went because pop up headlights will knacker a pedestrian if you run into them. This is why, you know, Things like the F150 and other American gargantuan truck trucks aren't sold over there because they are.
- [142:36]
A
See anybody under six foot tall if over your hood on an F150? I mean they're just. Or at least the 250. The big ones. They're really, really big.
- [142:43]
D
Yeah, I mean I tried little guys, terrifying.
- [142:46]
C
I'm like, you gotta run.
- [142:49]
A
What is it about little guys in big trucks?
- [142:51]
C
When you guys see the way we lift the truck, right? Everybody has a truck that's like seven feet off the ground here and like the people get out of it and they're like little tiny dudes.
- [143:03]
A
All right, let's take a little break here. If anybody's dogs need walking, this would be the take.
- [143:09]
B
Fitz is good.
- [143:10]
D
He's.
- [143:10]
B
He's napping.
- [143:11]
C
Oh.
- [143:11]
A
Oh yeah. What a sweetie.
- [143:14]
C
But we don't have that much time.
- [143:15]
A
That's Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. And his little doggy, Fritz Fitz. Or Fritz Fitz, short for.
- [143:23]
B
Short for Fitzgerald.
- [143:25]
D
Oh, F. Scott.
- [143:27]
A
F. Scott.
- [143:28]
B
F. Scott.
- [143:29]
A
Irish doggy. A little Scotsman known as Ian Thompson,
- [143:35]
D
also about a Scots of. The Duke of Edinburgh.
- [143:38]
C
It was.
- [143:38]
D
But yes.
- [143:39]
A
All right. Well, he's from Edinburgh.
- [143:43]
D
Yeah, well, he was from Greece, but
- [143:45]
A
yeah, okay, that's true. First, you're talking about Philip. Yeah, yeah. And of course, from Hawaii. Are you a Hawaiian?
- [143:54]
C
No, that's a. That is. Gets people in the mainland in trouble. Like native Hawaiians is a kingdom. It's a set of people. And. And we stole the land from them.
- [144:03]
D
Actually, we did it first, but true story.
- [144:06]
C
I always have to correct my mainland people. Like, I am from Hawaii, but I'm not Hawaiian. It's not the same thing as being Californian. Like, I'm just from Hawaii. We don't get that.
- [144:15]
A
When we were in the Big island and we loved it, by the way. Just loved it. A couple last month and I got to see the Captain Cook statue, but I think that's where they killed Captain Cook.
- [144:26]
D
I think, yeah, that's where they killed him and ate him. Yes.
- [144:29]
C
And after this week, I'm gonna go put a Coke on his head.
- [144:32]
A
Is that what you do? You put a cone on his.
- [144:35]
C
I want to. Now, now, just make it more fun.
- [144:38]
D
Everybody fans, there is. If you ever go to Glasgow, there's a. A statue of the Duke of Wellington on, and it has a traffic cone on its head. And every time the council removes it, the traffic cone goes back on. And apparently in Boston, when the Scots fans came over, an awful lot of statues ended up with traffic cones on them heads.
- [144:58]
A
Oh.
- [144:58]
D
But, yes, if you. If you check it out, there's.
- [145:02]
C
It's pretty funny.
- [145:03]
D
Almost certain.
- [145:04]
C
Tons of them. It's so good.
- [145:06]
A
He does kind of. It does kind of beg to have a traffic cone on his head.
- [145:10]
D
And, you know, it's a perfect fit.
- [145:13]
B
There's a Drag Queen on RuPaul's Drag Race UK who did that statue as. As one of her outfits.
- [145:19]
A
Oh, I love it.
- [145:20]
D
All right, now. I mean, it's. The thing is, the Duke of Wellington isn't popular in. In Scotland, and there is actually a. A verse of the National Anthem which is seldom sung these days, and with a rush. Rebellious, rebellious Scots to crush. But, yeah, he's not that popular. And the traffic cone is just every. The council stopped trying to take it down because, you know, it would be gone and then the next night it'd be up there. Again. And now Boston's getting a spill of that as well.
- [145:48]
A
Sometimes even the horse gets a traffic cone on its head.
- [145:51]
C
Dude, it's like not a new phrase. Gonna be nothing under the kilt. Cone on the head.
- [145:55]
D
Let's party. Well, you always get asked when you wear a kilt, what do you wear underneath it? And there are three answers. The. My great uncle, who. Who left me his kilt when he died, said, there are three answers to that. If you're on the pull and looking to meet up with a nice lass, then it's the future of Scotland. If it's anyone and anyone in general, then you say my courage. And if you're looking to start a fight, you say your wife's lipstick.
- [146:20]
C
Oh, I like it. I like it. I've always wanted to buy a Boyd tartan because my last name is Scottish, and so I've always wanted to go buy one. And my. My goal is to get there. And I have a buddy who I met when I was in uk. Her husband used to work for Dalmore. So he says if I ever come back, like, he can connect me to a lot of the whiskey places that I would want to visit.
- [146:41]
D
Very nice.
- [146:42]
C
He worked in a industry for, like, 40 years, so I can't wait to go back.
- [146:45]
A
Excuse me for just a second. I think there's loud music downstairs. I'm going to close the door.
- [146:50]
C
Oh, Leo, if it's too loud, you're too old, please.
- [146:55]
D
Oh, dude.
- [146:56]
C
Platform. This guy is winning the chat today. This is great.
- [146:59]
D
No, I mean, second. What. Seven years ago, Facebook reminded me. Yeah, we went on a. We did the North Coast 500, which is a tour around the north coast of Scotland. Scotland. And on the very first night, there was a bar there with 200 whiskies. And it was great for planning out because it's just like. Right, I'll try that. Yeah, we'll pop by that distillery and that distillery and that distillery. And it saved us Norfolk driving.
- [147:23]
C
So good.
- [147:24]
B
All right.
- [147:24]
A
Oh, we all wish we were there right now, but we're not. We're right here doing this Week in tech, which is brought to you this week by Box. You know that name. If you're an enterprise trying to transform your business, business with AI, you're likely facing an all too common challenge. Most AI tools are good at public knowledge. That's what they're trained on. But do they know your business? No, of course not. Do they know your product roadmaps? Well, how would they? Your sales materials, your HR policies? I hope not. Your Financial models the content that actually makes your company run well. They can. This is where Box comes in.
- [148:05]
B
Box.
- [148:05]
A
Box is building the intelligent content management platform for the AI era. And you're going to love this because it serves as a secure, essential context layer for Box's AI agents to access the unique institutional knowledge that makes a company run public. Models your information securely stored as a context layer inside Box. That's the way to do it. That's the key idea. The power of AI doesn't come just from the model alone. It starts with a model, but it comes from giving that model access to the right enterprise content. Your source of truth. Right Box's recent State of AI in the Enterprise report found that 96% of organizations say agents need access to company specific data. That's almost Everybody, but only 36% have connected agents to trusted companies. Content across many use cases. Everybody knows you need to do it, but so few do well. Box makes it easy. Box goes beyond file storage to connect content to people, apps and AI agents so teams can turn information into action. With tools like Box Agent, Box Extract, Box Hubs and more, organizations can accelerate knowledge work. They can pull intelligence from unstructured content and automate workflow. Box Agent is a unified AI experience across all your files. It can understand your natural language prompts. It can pull the right content and help you work through the task. I have to say, it's been my own experience that the model alone is not enough. Supplying it with knowledge about yourself, about your business, turns it into such a useful tool for agents both inside and outside Box, including tools tools. By the way, you're not stuck with any one model like Chat, GPT, Copilot. You can use Gemini, you can use Agent Force. You can use custom agents. Box becomes the trusted Content and File layer by its platform APIs. It has an MCP server, it has CLI. So these agents can use that information. And it stays secure. It stays in your enterprise. It doesn't get exfiltrated out to the AI. For enterprises that trust layers layer is is everything right. Box is built with security, with compliance, with governance and threat protection in mind. So employees and agents only access the information they're authorized to use. That's vital if you're thinking seriously about your company's AI transformation journey. Think beyond the model. That's not enough. Your business lives in your content and Box helps you bring that content securely into the AI infrastructure era. This is one of the really important insights that helps AI become so valuable to your business. Visit box.com AI if you want to learn more, box.comai box.com AI well, here come the AI specs. And it's not from maybe who you thought it would be from. Yes. It's not Met Meta. It's not Apple. It's actually the company that first started. Oh, man, I've been logged out again of Bloomberg. This is what Jon Gruber calls a dick over. It's not a popover. I'm already paying for Bloomberg, but for some reason it's just decided to cover the entire page. I was going to tell you about Snap's new spectacles. Yes, Snap app is launching AR spectacles. They are not cheap. $2,195. They don't make you look super cool. They might make you.
- [151:53]
D
I was going to say they kind of remind me of a friend of mine's in the American military. And the glasses they issue with. You issue with if you need glasses? Yeah, I mean, these are. They're basically called rape protection glasses because they're that ugly.
- [152:08]
C
We call them BCG birth control glasses in the office.
- [152:11]
D
All right. Okay.
- [152:12]
A
So on the left, actually, this is Harry. Thank you for not locking me out. This is Harry McCracken's article at Fast Company instead of Bloomberg. On the left, that's the original Snap spectacles, which I had. They didn't have AI, they just had a camera built in. They looked kind of cool. On the right is these new 2026 spectacles. Harry calls them the great, great, great grandchildren child of the original Snap spectrum.
- [152:37]
C
Check out Imogene on the bottom.
- [152:40]
A
I don't. You know, I really am a believer in this form factor for AI, but these are damn ugly. Yeah, these really are BCGs. Also, they're kind of expensive.
- [152:57]
B
Yeah.
- [152:58]
D
Yeah. I mean, also, they're kind of. I don't like them because any of the glass form factors because they're kind of intrusive. I was reading an article about one journalist who was checking into a hotel and he actually asked the, you know, the receptionist was wearing them and he said, can you take those off, please, because you're about to look at my credit card and I really don't want that information stayed on, you know, and it's honestly, I have a friend who wears the Meta glasses and whenever he has them on, I just. I don't want to be scanned when I'm walking down the street. Maybe I'm old fashioned.
- [153:33]
A
You'll get over it. Everybody's gonna have them.
- [153:35]
C
Yeah. I absolutely love these, though. And I tell you.
- [153:39]
A
Oh, I got them too.
- [153:39]
C
Yeah, these. These are my gen ones. I just bought new gen 2s. They're actually charging upstairs.
- [153:44]
A
Did you. You bought the new ones? I got the same case, exact one.
- [153:47]
C
Yeah, the lady, the lady in the store missing.
- [153:49]
A
We're talking about the Meta, but it
- [153:51]
C
turns out the case is interchangeable. But I did get the new gen 2s. And whatever really like about them, where they really come in handy is a lot of times when I'm sitting at, you know, airplane, whatever, we haven't done a takeoff yet. I haven't put on my other headphones yet. I can still hear what I'm listening
- [154:06]
A
to and what's going on.
- [154:08]
C
Yeah, I can still hear what's going on. So my number one use case for them is listening to podcasts or something when I still need to be ambiently aware of what's going on. The other thing that it works really well for, like I said, I do my walking talks, my ADHD brain dumps where I. I have to get in my steps. So I walk and I just basically brain dump new idea or client thing that I'm working on or something. And I just record all of that and I have it going into Whisper flow. And then from whisper flow I basically convert it into things. So it's a little bit better than Plod in the sense. But yeah, I don't go around creeper recording.
- [154:43]
A
So you can. So okay, this is good to know. So you can use the medic glasses to feed into your own AI Transform Description Service.
- [154:51]
C
Yes, I use a combination of Whisper flow and audio pin and I just keep switching back and forth because.
- [154:56]
A
Is there an a, is there a SDK, an API? Is there an MCP server?
- [155:00]
C
No, I use it just as the microphone for the one that's on the app on the phone. I didn't want to put it into the glasses per se because I don't trust Meta.
- [155:09]
A
I mean, that's my dream. Eventually tie these to your AI and then everything that you see becomes part of. Part of the, you know, the valuable information. Here's a picture of Imogene Heap wearing them. She doesn't look too bad. Notice they tint. They have a variety of tints they can apply, so they're trying to make them somehow tip. I guess we can get over it. What Darren OKE says in our Discord chat is, is actually a good point, which is if you don't tie them to a phone and Snap doesn't have a phone, Meta doesn't have a phone, they're inevitably going to be clunky because they have to put, put more computing into the glasses. More battery, more computing. These only run for four hours, although you can charge them up to four times with the case.
- [155:52]
C
Also, hey, this has been really long. When you're just listening to things, listening to music or whatever, they do one really long. Another reason why these come in super, super handy is being I travel a lot and of course when I go to Japan, I can read like a. Oh, the signs. I can read like an eighth grader. But anything harder than that, I got to be like, hey, what does this say?
- [156:18]
A
Unlike many countries, Japan does not make any concession to English. It's in Japanese.
- [156:23]
C
It's in Japanese.
- [156:24]
A
Yeah.
- [156:24]
C
That's why actually one of the, the pro tips, when you go to a restaurant and say, no English menu, oh, that's going to be off the chain.
- [156:29]
A
It's going to be much better. You don't want to go to the
- [156:31]
C
ones them they don't want. They won't. A lot of people say they're being mean or racist. They don't want to let you in because they don't want to give you bad surface because they can't communicate. So normally when I say, oh, they go, ah, okay, come in, come, come in. They're excited now. Not only get to hang out, they get to, you know, watch me screw up my Japanese or whatever.
- [156:48]
A
But saps trying to get over the hump of these ugliness by having what they call specs visionaries. Here's Golden State, Jimmy Butler wearing them. See, if you get enough fame, famous hipsters wearing them, maybe people will get say, oh, you know, that's where Apple
- [157:06]
C
watch was though back then.
- [157:08]
A
It's very, very expensive.
- [157:09]
B
I mean, the, the celebrity thing didn't work with Google Glass. Why would it work now? Glass was weird and asymmetrical. Like, you know.
- [157:18]
D
Yeah, no, I mean I, I remember when Google class Glass came out. Google got really quite annoyed with the Register because we coined the term glass holes. Used it in every single article. Article. And eventually, I mean, we had angry phone calls from their PR just like, no, we're not going to give you one of you when you're calling.
- [157:38]
A
I get bad news for him.
- [157:40]
D
Well, no, I mean the triumph was when Google actually used the term itself in a press release saying, don't be a glass hole. And it was just like, yes, nailed it.
- [157:50]
C
Does that predate the term for Glasswegians or after.
- [157:55]
D
No, no, you don't, you don't insult Glaswegians.
- [157:57]
A
Now if I were on My head.
- [158:01]
C
People say that?
- [158:02]
A
Yeah, it might be. Okay.
- [158:03]
D
Well they also have the phrase the Glasgow Kiss, which is being headbutted.
- [158:07]
C
So yeah, you definitely don't want to do that. We say that about Massachusetts people. We call them so. Yeah, that's right.
- [158:14]
A
That actually predates glass holes. Anyway, Harry says they no longer look like a cyber truck affixed to your face. I might disagree with that.
- [158:22]
C
Oh yeah.
- [158:24]
A
Shouldn't run into Eddie Padet pedestrians with them on.
- [158:27]
C
Oh my gosh, this guy's killing me.
- [158:29]
A
Unlike in many products, it's self contained. No external battery pack, input device other than your hands or dependency on a smartphone. That's why they're so clunky. They weigh, they don't weigh that much. 100. They were four, four and a half to 4.8 ounces. That's not that heavy. I don't know.
- [158:47]
C
But you know Leo in because of sort of K pop, hip hop pop. The style of glasses that these are is very common, right?
- [158:56]
A
Chunky, kind of big chunky.
- [158:58]
C
Yeah. So Ray Band just dropped the new collaboration with ASAP Rocky and they're the puffier Ray Bands but Oliver Peoples, a bunch of brands. Tom Ford, they have these sort of giant thick frames that are built off the original Blues Brothers wayfarer or the BCGs and so they don't look, look that far removed but they're like extra chunky.
- [159:21]
A
These have a heads up display built in. Bigger than the meta Ray Ban displays I think it was. Let me see if I can find the, the angle of it. It's. It doesn't fill your. It doesn't fill the whole screen but it's about, I think it's two or three times bigger than the, the Ray Ban displays. I want to say 51 degrees but I have to find this in Harry's article. They have sound, they have. You know, many of Harry points out the original Macintosh sold for $8,000 when adjusted for inflation. So 2195 is not too outrageous. It is laptop cost. Can you do everything you could do with them that you could do with a laptop? I don't think so. I think this is a very early product. Early adopters will probably be very early adopters will be interested. I don't see it as a mass appeal product by any means. Any more than the Apple Vision Pros were.
- [160:21]
C
I can't wait to see what Apple finally gets around to though.
- [160:24]
A
And Apple has the iPhone and I think that that's going to make a big difference because now you have the computing platform off the glasses in Your pocket and it's Internet connected. It helps with weight, it helps with size, it helps with battery life and it can have much faster processor to the iPhones are very heavy duty processors now.
- [160:45]
C
Yeah, matters are a little slow as far as the AI stuff goes in the glasses. So it'd be really interesting to see what Apple can do with especially dedicated access to the, the chips that are inside of our, you know, the in base iPhone.
- [160:58]
A
Snap spun the business out into a subsidiary. It's called Specs Inc. And these are the specs. They have been seeding developers with them for a while. So there will be some stuff you can turn yourself into a cat or a lizard. You can twist your face like Silly Putty. I don't know with whom I guess if you're in a call, I don't know. Snapchat shows you what your camera sees the moment you launch the app. So that's kind of nice. And that was something that Ray Ban displays I, I think do as well as you could finally see what you're. You're glad because you can't write with these. Owen. I'm sorry Doc, you can't.
- [161:43]
C
No, not see the. And I really thought hard about getting displays but I was like, no, I'm just get the regular ones because I don't want to be heavy.
- [161:51]
A
They're expensive. Well, we'll see. Anyway, Snapchat is getting into the game with a chunky version of these, of these glasses, the specs. And Evan, Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat said this, this, we're counting on this going forward.
- [162:07]
C
You know what A lot of the, A lot of the. I know what the terminology is. I don't want to call them influencers, I hate that word. But the Carly, the Kylie Jenner, Justin Bieber type clan that grew up with making Snapchat what it is today day, they would be who they're going to use to kind of get people into this.
- [162:27]
A
Yeah.
- [162:28]
C
And it's going to become a very expensive play for parents that have to buy their kids like 2000, 2000 maybe
- [162:34]
A
Kylie Jenner has 1000.
- [162:38]
C
Has one. Yeah, there you go, Charlemagne.
- [162:41]
B
But I mean are, are there going to be Knockoffs of the oh, 100.
- [162:44]
D
Yeah.
- [162:45]
C
That's where the day comes.
- [162:46]
A
I think I'm gonna do what everybody is saying. I'm gonna wait a lot. Apple comes up with it might not be next year, it might be two years from now.
- [162:53]
D
But I think Chinese manufacturers are going to make a much cheaper, much better version of these. As far as I can see.
- [163:00]
A
But if you're not attached to an ecosystem, I don't know if it's a good, a good thing to buy. I think you want to be attached to the Apple ecosystem or I think
- [163:07]
C
Snap would have been better to make them cheaper, but make it like, you know, platform gnostic, where it's very much a Snapchat thing. So they can bring it. Snapchat is a secretly grown again again. But like to tie it directly into Snapchat and then, you know, like use that as the play where they're going to make the money off the advertising later. That would have made more sense. But 2000 is a lot, bro.
- [163:28]
D
Yeah.
- [163:28]
B
For these and Snapchat. Any prescription Snapchat Stock is down like 95 plus from their 20, 21 high.
- [163:38]
A
That's why they're saying we need this to survive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's almost a pivot.
- [163:43]
C
It's a swing. Swing and a miss.
- [163:47]
A
Fox is spending $22 billion to buy Roku.
- [163:51]
C
Oh, my God, I'm so mad.
- [163:52]
A
And now the picture is starting to become a little bit clearer. Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox, says they're going to keep the two companies separate. Remember, Roku doesn't just make little streaming devices, they make TVs. And I think this is a big plug play for the streaming market. And the kinds of Data that the
- [164:14]
C
TVs get, the big play thus far with they. I mean, talk about letting your hand out on the table, right? We're sitting here with all the aces. Two weeks before World cup starts, I get a notification on my Apple TV that the Fox Sports app will no longer work. What you need to get Fox one. Okay. I only have the Fox Sports app on my phone for two reasons. Football and football. Like, other than that, I don't use it. I don't want to go anywhere near that network. Right. I had the Fox regular app there because of, there was a TV show at one point that I used to like that I don't longer watch. But yeah, they moved everything into one app. And so when you go to look for your World cup game, there will be Lamine Yamal and you know, the Saudi player on the front. And then right underneath it, Fox shows all of the Fox shows that are like the A patriot, I'm a soldier, let's watch army men do this kind of thing. That's all on the next fold. So even before you get to the fold, there's all of the Fox sphere crap right underneath it.
- [165:15]
A
Exactly.
- [165:15]
C
So to get to the World cup coverage, you got to go down, down, down, down, down about seven times down the fold and then you could get to the hub. That would take you straight into the World Cup. Now of course, if you're, if you know how to use nerd tech, you can swipe left and get the tiny little mini menu and scroll all the way down to the bottom seven things down and find the one that says sports, which will take you over. But even when you get to that page, there's the World cup banner, then there's all the US Football and baseball and whatnot, nascar. And then more shows about how the American might of this NASCAR driver and blah, blah, blah. It's, it's so irritating.
- [165:50]
A
It's all about selling fonts.
- [165:51]
C
The propagandizing of the World cup hub on Fox one is absolute dookie and it irritates the crap out of me. Let them get their hands on Roku and oh my God, brain cells are over.
- [166:05]
A
Well, according to the Verge, there's unlikely to be any regulatory hurdles.
- [166:10]
C
Of course there's not.
- [166:11]
A
Not certainly in the United States.
- [166:13]
D
That's so last century, you know, and
- [166:15]
A
even from the eu because Roku and Fox have kind of a small footprint in the eu.
- [166:21]
C
So
- [166:24]
D
I worry what Doc was talking about is going to happen to Formula One when Apple fully takes it over and we're going to see exactly the same kind of situation. This media consolidation used to be considered a bad thing, but it's very much the vogue at the moment.
- [166:38]
A
And already they've introduced ads into my Formula one stream. I'm not too happy about that.
- [166:44]
B
I. Oh really?
- [166:46]
A
Yeah.
- [166:46]
B
The thing about Fox that people forget is they own this, you know, this streaming service called Tubi, which is a fast or free ad ad supported television service. In other words, just free streaming with yes ads. But as Netflix has shown, as Amazon has shown, where, you know, where they've put in ad supported tiers where they used to just have, you know, the pure premium streaming video services. People generally prefer to pay a little less or nothing and put up with some ads. We, the media elite may not like them, but it seems to be the way of the world. Now there's basically two players with good fast services. It's Fox and Paramount. Paramount has Pluto, which is a really good service. They're looking at ways to combine Pluto and Paramount plus and when you put all of the Warner Brothers content, HBO into, into that system, it could be really effective distribution. All of these companies are looking for a post broadcast, post cable future. And I think this is the scariest
- [168:04]
C
part about what Owen just said is now that Paramount Pluto play is Skynet dance. I'm gonna call it Skynet. You do what you want. And then the other one is the Fox Roku play, right? So again you talk about trying to get one handed side talking. And again, this is just tv, right? This is not news. This isn't that thing of the, you know, fake news versus whatever news news. It's just regular tv. But when you're watching the World cup and right now all of the commercials that haven't been bought before by somebody has been filled in with commercials for to be oriented shows, a whole bunch of like America first oriented show shows. And then man, I have never seen so many ads for Jesus in the middle of a freaking World Cup. Like, I mean it's not, I mean I'm trying to be factious. If you go by the, the global Scala thing and the amount of people, teams and stuff that are playing, that's it would be. I could see Catholic side maybe, maybe I could even see a little bit of the Islamic side of it in a commercial. But all the commercials are like Jesus commercials, you know, like you just have to watch a World cup match on, on the Fox one app and it, it's, you'll, you'll see it, you'll be like, oh my God. They are counter programming like heavily with the ad space that they didn't sell because I think a lot of people were scared into believing or companies were scared of believing that World cup wouldn't be big because of the weird stuff that has been going on here because
- [169:35]
A
of the FIFA Peace Prize.
- [169:37]
C
Yeah, there we go. I was, I was trying to be nice about it, but if you see the counter programming, I'm like, bro, if my brain was dirty and was ready to be washed, I could see how I could get bit. I could see I could become a Fox fan watching the do it. You just have to go and see, just watch one game in the Fox one app versus watching on your regular TV and you'll see exactly what I'm saying. You'll be like, oh my God. The only reason why I watch it because it's 4K. The one that comes on TV is coming in 2K, which I think again they did on purpose.
- [170:05]
B
What are they going to do to Roku City though? What's Fox going to do to Roku City?
- [170:09]
A
What's Roku City?
- [170:10]
B
That's the screensaver everybody watches.
- [170:12]
A
Oh, the little screen savers. Yeah.
- [170:14]
B
Oh, I do the aquarium.
- [170:16]
A
Yeah, you're going to see Gretchen Carlson
- [170:18]
C
floating like that's some of the most
- [170:19]
B
watched stuff on river is those screens. So like they're going to put something there, right? Oh yeah. I mean Apple aerials, bro.
- [170:27]
C
Like I get so many people that tell me that they just like to watch the Apple aerials. Especially when you said I like the aerials. The undersea you see like dolphins and sharks.
- [170:36]
A
I love the aerials. One more. Speaking of underwater, Mid Journey has gone from generating images to full body ultra scan sound scans. Scans. I'm not sure how this works. Mid Journey, which was until, you know, maybe Nano Banana, the dominant image generating tool. We use it like crazy, but I haven't used it in ages because the, you know, the frontier companies have kind of caught up. So they announced a new business, a ultrasound scanner, Full body scanner that they say uses 4 butterfly. This is a ultrasound tech company, Butterfly Network, ultrasound on chip imaging modules. And then they use Midjourney's AI capabilities to analyze it to create a full body scan. There's some question about what kind of resolution the scan's going to have and how useful it will be. But they want to compete with companies like Prenuvo who $5000 or maybe they're not quite that expensive. $2000 MRI on demand. MRIs not ordered by your doctor, but just for you. They could, they want to have these ultrasounds everywhere and you just walk in and you get dunked in water. And then they plan to put 10 of the scanners into a Mid Journey spa location in Union Square which will open before the end of Union Scare San Francisco, by the way, which will open before the end of 2027. And then they're going to try to try to do it all over the country. It's a complete pivot for Mid Journey.
- [172:17]
B
So Union Square is becoming this hub for like AI companies.
- [172:20]
A
Oh, is it really? Yeah, it used to be where Macy's was. Right.
- [172:23]
B
There's world. Macy's is still there. But Macy's actually deployed some interesting location shopping technology back in the day. So it's, it's been a tech playground for a while while Union Square. But you've got the World coin, you know the orb.
- [172:40]
A
Oh, that's right.
- [172:40]
D
The orb's in there.
- [172:43]
B
Yeah. And I wouldn't be surprised if you saw more of these. Interestingly, it's the Mid Journey spa is specifically on Grand Avenue which is like a very high end part of Union Square. It's not on the square proper. It's like an, it's. That's where all the Fancy.
- [173:01]
A
Like the Apple store is. Right.
- [173:04]
B
Apple store is on the northeast corner of Stockton and Post, but a block from the app. This is a block east. And it's, it's even posher, so it can't be cheap real estate. Wow. What their play is. Is it, you know, is it visibility? That may be. You know, it's hard to, it's hard to understand how that fits with image and video generation.
- [173:31]
A
It's basically pushing all your chips into the middle. You're betting the whole bank just like Snap is doing on a, on a high risk, high reward bet and just crossing your fingers.
- [173:44]
C
It's funny when you think about it. Like at one point you would go down there. I remember every time I had to go to Union to go to Bong and Olsen just to watch the stereo go.
- [173:57]
A
I remember that.
- [173:58]
C
You got Tiffany Saxman Avenue. Yeah, right there. Strangely enough, on the, on the. I keep want to say Powell, but it's Post. On the Post side there's a donut shop that's like two steps away from the corner, which is off the chain that I used to always go to. But it's weird that that has become an AI thing. And I do remember when we first got, you know, like the Macy's was doing the location based drops on your phone when you would walk in. They were using Beacon. Beacon AI. Because I knew somebody that worked there and that was like, you know, your iPhone screen would show you things when you'd go into certain stores down there. And it was like the test bed for all of that. So it makes sense the, the lineage is there. But yeah, it's kind of a weird play. That's just in that one spot though.
- [174:40]
A
Take one more break and then wrap it up with some final stories. You're watching this week in tech with Ian Thompson. Owen Thomas. Doc Rock. So glad to have you. Of course, all our club members make this show possible, huh?
- [174:52]
C
I'm changing my name to Dachshund.
- [174:54]
A
Dachshund Roxon Thompson. Dachshund Thompson.
- [174:58]
C
Sorry.
- [174:59]
D
Sorry.
- [174:59]
C
Leo.
- [174:59]
A
Ian Thompson. Rock. Rockin Thompson and. And some other guy.
- [175:04]
D
Hey, Rocking Thompson. I can live with Rockin Thompson.
- [175:07]
A
I like it. Owen the Rock and Dachshund Toxin. No, Doc, Toxin's not good. We'll figure it out. We're working on it. The AI will help us in just a bit. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. We talk about the potential rewards of AI. And for any business, it's something you can't ignore. But the risks are there too, and you don't want to ignore those. The loss of sensitive data and attacks against enterprise managed AI and plus generative AI is a boon just as it is for your business, for the bad guys, for threat actors help helping them create rapidly create phishing lures and write malicious code and automate data extraction. And they can do this all at speed. So it's very hard to fight. Some of it is just completely inadvertent, just information leaked because your employees are using AI to analyze things like your tax returns. I think this is probably the source of this fact. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked leaked to AI applications. It's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. Just ask Chad Pallet. He's the acting CISO at BioIVT. He says Zscaler helped them reduce their cyber premiums, their insurance premiums, by 50% and at the same time double their coverage and improve their controls. Take a look at this from Chad. With Zscaler, as long as you've got Internet, you're good to go. A big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away
- [176:43]
D
from sd, WAN and VPN is to
- [176:45]
A
eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network. It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe style environment. With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more@zscaler.com Security that's Zscaler.com Security Let me thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. We were talking earlier, I forgot to mention this. We were talking about the rising prices in commodities and money. Nothing has canceled their inexpensive phone, their low price phone, the CMF phone, due to RAM prices. Nothing's founder says we can't build the budget phone as a price at a price that makes sense. Carl Pei said the RAM shortage has impacted most of the company's mid range phones as well. For the phone, 4Amemory costs double. The memory is now the most expensive component in the smartphone, more than half of the overall cost. Not good.
- [178:10]
D
No. You do wonder where this is going to end up. I mean, it could be one of the side benefits of the AI bubble finally popping as the memory prices come down. When people always superficial data centers don't get built after all. And there's a big surge of memory coming onto the market, but it's not looking good at them moment.
- [178:30]
A
You actually had a story in the San Francisco Business Journal about the boom being caused by this AI IPO wave. Owen, let me close the popups there. The AI IPO wave is coming, but the Bay Area hasn't seen a boom like this one. How is it going to change the Bay Area?
- [178:51]
B
Yeah. This was written by my colleague, our editor in chief, Jeremy Owens. The key difference is that the wealth from these companies, it's going to be highly concentrated. When these companies grew so fast that the kind of early cohort of employees who got stock options was much smaller than say at Facebook or Twitter or Salesforce, those companies kind of grew gradually over time, raised several rounds of venture capital. OpenAI and Anthropic have done everything at kind of turbo speed and their valuations are nearing a trillion dollars already as private companies. SpaceX, which now has an AI story, is I believe still worth about $2 trillion on the public markets.
- [179:43]
A
They minted what, 400 millionaires with SpaceX stuff stock. And I think, yeah, that's some, some like tens of centimillionaires, cafeteria workers at SpaceX included.
- [179:57]
B
Which reminds me of the, you remember the Google massage therapist who got sock
- [180:01]
A
options or the, or the Meta, the guy at Meta who painted the mural on the wall.
- [180:05]
D
Yes. The graffiti artist.
- [180:07]
C
Yes.
- [180:08]
A
They didn't want to give him money so they gave him stock.
- [180:10]
B
But you know, this is not going to be like a broad based kind of wealth generator. It's, it's going to be, you know, know, mansions in Pacific Heights, in Atherton.
- [180:21]
A
It's interesting, your cover story actually points out that these companies are not leaving San Francisco. You know, people like Elon have famously moved to Texas. But OpenAI and Anthropic are, they have
- [180:32]
B
really put down roots and they've become, you know, besides the, the near trillion dollar valuation, they're also both near or at a million square feet of office space. Wow. And you know, that implies, you know, that implies employee accounts in the, you know, in the high single thousands. You know, that's enough room for roughly, you know, off the top of my head, that 6,000, 7,000 employees worth of space. Now Anthropic has leased a big tower for its headquarters. They have not moved in yet. That's going to be next year. So they're not there yet, but they really are planning on being large, large employers in San Francisco. I wrote about Salesforce overtaking Wells Fargo as the largest private sector employer in San Francisco. That happened several years ago, I believe. 2018, 2019, we could easily see OpenAI or Anthropic. They're both growing quickly, overtaking Salesforce in not so many years. In terms of employee count.
- [181:45]
A
Will they take over that penis building downtown?
- [181:49]
B
You know, I, I think Salesforce has a, has a long term lease there. Anthropic actually has kind of cornered the market on real estate around Salesforce Tower. There's a street, Howard street, it's two blocks south of Market street and we're, we've nicknamed it Anthropic Row because they have, they have along basically three consecutive blocks of Howard Street. They have leases in like every building. 300, 400, 500. Howard.
- [182:20]
A
Have we seen this before with, I mean Twitter was in San Francisco.
- [182:25]
B
You know, Twitter's not a bad comparison. When Twitter leased, you know, its, its space in 1355 market that was seen as transformative for mid market. Now that didn't turn out. Twitter of course is now X and they are completely out of San Francisco. They do have some operations in Palo Alto along with xai. So they have not quit California despite the, you know, the reincorporation in Texas. But yeah, I think, you know, that would be the, the biggest analogy or frankly Salesforce moving into Salesforce Tower. That was a big statement, you know, a decade or so ago.
- [183:07]
A
Yeah, we still call it Salesforce Tower, but Salesforce didn't build.
- [183:10]
D
Build it.
- [183:11]
B
True.
- [183:11]
A
Yeah, they were just the flagship tenant
- [183:17]
B
and ironically, roughly where OpenAI is now. Salesforce was going to put its campus there, but they decided it wasn't going to be enough space. So they snagged about a third of Salesforce Tower instead and became the namesake of the tower.
- [183:34]
A
This is the 20,000 square foot foot building that we'll call the Anthropic squatty building.
- [183:42]
B
Yeah, that's, that's their little building in Jackson Square. Jackson Square is still very popular with like smaller AI startups. It's a, it's a little neighborhood immediately, immediately north of where I'm sitting in the financial district.
- [183:55]
A
It's a nice neighborhood. Yeah, I mean and this is a little bit more, looks like more like an AI company.
- [184:01]
B
That's, that's fancy schmancy. Now that's part of a complex. You see. It's actually four buildings around an intersection. Four more or less similarly designed buildings. That's called Foundry Square and that's recently that's been leased by BlackRock, Oric, PwC so big financial law, accounting firms. Now Anthropic is taking over a lot of that.
- [184:27]
A
How many employees do these companies have? I mean, isn't the whole point of AI that you don't need to have hundreds of thousands of employees?
- [184:34]
B
Well, you know, that's the interesting thing, right, Is, you know, you need. These companies are betting on adoption in the enterprise. And, you know, you can't just like, air way into a Fortune 500 company.
- [184:47]
A
Right.
- [184:47]
B
You need salespeople, you need sales engineers, you need, you know, consultants. They're going public, so you need accountants, legal. Now, of course, they're all, you know, telling a good story about how they use AI to make their, you know, their own internal operations more efficient. And I'm sure they're doing that. But, you know, the reality is, like, they've got hundreds of open jobs, like at the moment that they're.
- [185:13]
A
That they're hiring for 1 million square feet of office space between Anthropic in downtown San Francisco.
- [185:21]
B
Yeah. And, you know, OpenAI has really cornered Mission Bay. Anthropic has cornered that, you know, that part of the financial district where they are. They want dense, walkable campuses. They want that creativity, they want that vibe of being in person.
- [185:39]
A
So in a way, Amazon and Microsoft and Boeing kind of made Seattle what it is. And Amazon's kind of wild architecture in Seattle and so forth. And Microsoft founder who built that Frank Cary Museum and so forth. Paul Allen. Paul Allen. I wonder if San Francisco is going to be shaped by these AI companies in the decades to come, much like Seattle was.
- [186:04]
C
I mean, it was for a minute, right. And then, you know, it kind of went because, well, it's been going through.
- [186:09]
A
I mean, San Francisco went through a
- [186:10]
C
bed, went through a bunch of changes. Right. So that. That building is. Is. Is it right across from the Ferry Building? Is that the market? 1. One market building?
- [186:18]
B
One market is. Is interesting because it's really been struggling,
- [186:22]
C
Right, because that was Twitter, right?
- [186:24]
B
No, Google was. Google was in One Market. You're right. You've got a good memory. Salesforce, before it was in Salesforce Tower had One Market as its longtime home. But One Market is actually. We've written about the kind of struggle that Belding has had with refilling vacancies, especially after Google pulled out. Google is still in San Francisco. They've got a. They've got a building, actually. I can like practically walk out and see it. Yes, street, but also One Maritime Plaza. They have a big presence in. In that tower.
- [187:03]
D
They've also got offices in the Ferry Building. I was surprised to learn recently
- [187:08]
C
that's the corner. Right. Market and Spear is where one market is and then the Ferry Building. They used to have the bombass, the rolly rolly truck. He used to make like. Oh yeah, like prosciutto. That's prosciutto. Yeah, not prosciutto. What's the word I'm looking for? The porchetta. You make the porchetta sandwiches like right there. And so that's where you always go because it's by the federal.
- [187:29]
A
Now you're making me hungry. It's dinner time. I don't think you should be talking
- [187:32]
C
about that's the best thing in San Fran. That and then go up to the mission and go get a two foot paper dosa. But yeah, so it's really weird because I remember, remember one of my buddies worked at, at what's the word with the Salesforce back then. He was my editor when I was at tua. He worked at Salesforce and we used to go to that building and then go grab food across the street. And so that whole area was like little pockets of tech and then it was like oh they smart, they put it all in the financial area. So you're saying now these guys pick their buildings up and go somewhere else where they get better, better rate. What's the reason for.
- [188:06]
A
I'm just surprised. San Francisco has a reputation for being very expensive. You know, the big tech companies are down the peninsula in Silicon Valley where the rent is cheaper in towns like San Jose. What is it about San Francisco that makes these companies want.
- [188:20]
B
Well, there's been a, there's been a reset. So prices are still not cheap, but there's been, there's been an opportunity kind of in this moment now.
- [188:32]
C
Stanford Lie.
- [188:33]
B
Yeah, the, the, you know the thing is it's fomo.
- [188:37]
D
Right.
- [188:37]
B
Like people want to be in the heart of the action. And right now the perception is if you're an AI, San Francisco is where the heart of the action is. The big exception to that of course is, is SpaceX. They're putting, they're putting their bets on Xai and Palo Alto. And of course they can tap into Google and Meta, which are building up big AI labs. Yes. And you know, in Mountain View and Menlo Park Park. So you know, it's not, it's not all or nothing. There's going to be some stuff in Silicon Valley. There's going to be some, some stuff in San Francisco. But venture capital too is like,
- [189:16]
C
is
- [189:16]
D
setting up the SF address.
- [189:18]
B
Yeah. If they haven't Already established some kind of little San Francisco outpost. There's an alley, then they're going to be. There's an alley, you know, right. Right around the corner from us where three venture capital offices have popped up with like little, Little storefront. Little storefront signs.
- [189:41]
A
I'm kind of happy to see that I left my heart in San Francisco. I love the city. It's a beautiful little fishing village.
- [189:48]
D
It got really hammered during lockdown because, I mean, I was working the city there and it was like walking through the set of 28 days later. I mean, it was just very hard.
- [189:57]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [189:58]
B
The. The world. We were talking about the world cup at the, you know, at the top of the show. The, you know, the vibe with. With like World cup watch parties is kind of off the hook.
- [190:10]
A
Interesting. I'm glad to see it coming back.
- [190:16]
C
And the Intercontinental and getting drinks at the Chieftain. Like, I don't even know what's in Moscone center area. And now, like, yeah, that was.
- [190:24]
D
Oh, the Chieftain's still there.
- [190:25]
B
Yeah. Now I, I got to say, Moscone, that area is still a little challenged. And especially like west of Moscone, there's
- [190:36]
A
quite a homeless encampment down there. There's a big drug crisis down there.
- [190:40]
B
Yeah. And, you know, it's just like that, that kind of, you know, the kind of post industrial, renovated warehouse office space that was so popular during the dot com boom. That's the kind of office space that landlords are really having trouble filling.
- [190:56]
A
That's where tech TV was, of course.
- [190:58]
B
Yeah. As you can see, like, you know, the, the offices that. That anthropic and OpenAI are taking, they're like new buildings. Big, glassy, open, Very different open floor plans. Yeah. You know, AI companies generally want new move in. Ready. No, no kind of, you know, no kind of quirks or charm.
- [191:20]
A
Just like, no charm, no history.
- [191:22]
B
Yeah.
- [191:24]
A
Before we wrap up, I usually end the show with memoriam. There are a couple of people passed in this past week that I think deserve attention. One is somebody that I didn't know of, but so many of my friends speak so highly of him. He was very instrumental in turning Austin into a tech mecca. Jonathan Joshua Baer, the founder of a small VC firm called Capital factory, died in a small plane crash. It was an accelerator, really, and it turned Austin into a real tech hunt. Very many people I know just think the world of him. Everybody's had very kind things to say. So there's a lot of shock in Austin after the passing of Joshua Baird, the godfather of Austin's. Startup scene quite tragic. He was fairly young. And then another person you might know of, you know of his company. He's one of the founders of Ubisoft. Claude Guillaume passed in another plane crash. A couple of plane crashes. Ubisoft. I didn't know this. The history of Ubisoft is kind of interesting. They were a mail order software business that they transformed he and his brother into one of the world's largest video game companies. They also made hardware and the Guillermore Corporation made a lot of controllers for flight simulators and driving simulators and things like that. So he will be missed. Claude Guillermo passed away in a plane crash. Couple of immemorials. It's kind of sad to end the show with that. I should end it with something more upbeat. Happy Father's Day. Happy longest day of the year. Longest show of the year at this point, I think. And also his pride. Pride Month. And that was another great story you had in the San Francisco Business Times. Yes, AI may be big in San Francisco, but let's not forget it is also a very prideful town. Did they. Is the parade. Did they already have the parade?
- [193:39]
B
No, that's a week from today.
- [193:42]
A
Nice. That's always a. Always a party in San Francisco.
- [193:46]
B
AI. How about Gay Eye?
- [193:53]
A
Thank you so much, Owen. Great to see you. Owen Thomas is the managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times and always a welcome. Hugh and Fitz are always a welcome presence on the show.
- [194:05]
B
Thank you.
- [194:05]
A
Thank you for being here. We appreciate it. Thank you for putting up with this marathon. I didn't mean to make it a marathon. You know, it often happens that when I get people on I really like, we just can't stop talking. Ian Thompson, also a longtime friend of the show. Great to have you. And Stumpy the cat.
- [194:23]
D
Yes. Who's been using the litter box during the show, much to my discomfort.
- [194:27]
A
For some reason, Stumpy just waits until twit and then. It's time, baby. It's time. Great to see you. You will find Ian's view from the Valley. In fact, you could subscribe to. Where do they go to subscribe to it?
- [194:42]
D
Just go to techfinitive.com and you can log in.
- [194:46]
A
Yeah, absolutely wonderful. Techfinitive.com look for the view from the Valley from our own Ian Thompson. And of course, Stock Rock. You'll find him walking cockily down the hallways of ecamm saying, you can't fire me.
- [195:05]
C
We don't have any hallways.
- [195:07]
A
There's no hallways here.
- [195:08]
C
That's in Massachusetts Far Wheels Way.
- [195:11]
A
What do you think we are anthropic. He's the director of strategic partnerships there at ecamm. Thank you, ecamm, for making this show possible. We appreciate your software. It's great. You'll find them on YouTube. YouTube.com doc rock. And you're rooting for the Netherlands, huh?
- [195:27]
C
Yeah, I just. I think they'll finally pull it off, you know. You know, Leo, they said the AI is supposed to make these things go by faster. Somehow you made it.
- [195:35]
A
Made it longer. Jeez Geez Louise. Oh, my goodness. Ian, who are you rooting for? England?
- [195:45]
D
Actually, I'm rooting for Scotland, but I think I'm going to be facing a disappointment on that one. England have got a decent game, but I think the Netherlands has got a strong chance. We'll see how France plays. Spain has been a real disappointment so far.
- [195:59]
A
Really good today, though.
- [196:01]
C
Yeah, five to one today it's really Netherlands. France and Argentina are probably the.
- [196:09]
A
That sounds exciting. That sounds good. And Owen, do you care?
- [196:13]
B
You know, I. I just want people to. To come and buy beers and, you know, and hang out in downtown San Francisco. It's good for the city.
- [196:21]
A
Yeah. Yeah, it's good for the city. Thank you everybody for joining us. A special thanks to our club Twit members who make this show possible, make all of our show possible with their memberships. 10 bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows, plus access to the club Twit Discord and all the special programming we do just for you in the club coming up this week. I'm excited about it. Episode. Well, technically it's Episode two, but it's. We're going to call it Episode three of the Great show with Jeff Atwood. We call off by 1. Get it off by 1 is. See, it was a little programming. Little programming. Programming humor. Off by One. Let me see what the schedule says. I think it's Friday coming up. Yes, Friday the 26th at 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. Choose your own adventure with the wild and woolly Jeff Atwood. That'll be a lot of fun. That's one of many club shows we do. Our AI user group is coming up July 3rd, Micah's crafting corner, the 16th. We had a great time with the media club. If you're in the club, listen to that recording. That was from last Friday, day before yesterday. We talked about the movie the Fifth Element. Mike will be doing more of those. But most importantly, the club supports everything we do here. If you believe in. We're not owned by a big company. The Murdochs do not own this. If you believe in independent journalism company covering big tech without fear or favor, your support is really appreciated. Support all of the all of the podcasts and websites that do that. We need independent media covering big tech, but support us too. Twit TV Club Twit. We do Twit every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern Time, 2100 UTC. You can watch it in the club in the discord, but also YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We stream it everywhere after the fact on demand versions of the show, audio or video available at our website, Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel with the video. Great way to share clips with friends and family. And of course, subscribing is the easiest thing to do. Find your favorite podcast client, subscribe. Leave us a great review too. That would help. And that way you'll get it automatically as soon as it's available. Thanks for joining us, everybody. Have a wonderful Father's Day day. Enjoy the sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere, shortest day of the year in the Southern hemisphere. So, you know, enjoy the darkness down there. And we'll be back next week. Meanwhile, another twit is in the can. Bye. Bye. Hey, Everybody, it's Leo Laporte. You know about MacBreak Weekly, right? You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with Apple, this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inako, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news. It's an easy subscription. Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Mac Break Weekly. Or visit our website, Twitter, TV mbw. You don't want to miss a week of Mac Break Weekly.
- [199:22]
D
That's amazing.
- [199:26]
C
Doing the Twit, Doing the Twit all right. Doing the Twit, baby.
- [199:30]
A
Doing the Twit all right.