This Week in Tech 1091: But You Didn't Move the Bodies

Summary

This Week in Tech 1091: But You Didn't Move the Bodies

Date: July 6, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Panel: Lisa Schmeiser (NoJitter.com), Jason Heiner (TheDeepView.com), Owen J.J. Stone (OhDoctah)

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Episode Overview

This episode of TWiT brings together veteran tech journalists and commentators to grapple with the most urgent issues in technology today: the Supreme Court’s landmark privacy ruling, the evolving realities of AI cost and regulation, the controversial relaunch of Anthropic’s Fable, the economic and environmental impacts of AI (including the so-called "AI tax"), prediction markets gone wild, and much more. The tone is energetic, skeptical, and at times irreverent—no adulation here, but plenty of memorable moments and deep context for where technology is leading us.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

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1. Supreme Court Ruling on Geofencing Warrants & Fourth Amendment Privacy ([05:56] - [20:51])

• The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that law enforcement’s use of geofencing warrants violates the Fourth Amendment.
  • Leo Laporte: “This is maybe more important than it’s getting credit for... Sensitive data scooped up by these warrants counts as a Fourth Amendment search."
  • Lisa Schmeiser: “One of the most interesting aspects of this ruling is them putting forth the idea that people actually own their individual data ... it opens the door to all sorts of interesting developments.” [10:43]
  • Jason Heiner: “Anything that helps protect citizens from overreach by government or corporations ... is a good thing.” [06:46]
• Discussion of related technologies like Flock license plate/Bluetooth reader cameras.
  • Leo: "Just because you’re in public doesn't mean you don’t have some expectation of privacy."
  • Owen J.J. Stone: "Most criminals are not smart ... I’m hoping this ruling could help protect us from Flock cameras and systems that are pulling in Bluetooth data." [08:46]

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2. Surveillance Culture, Cameras & Social Change ([12:50] - [18:54])

• The normalization of surveillance in daily life, both in China and increasingly the U.S.
  • Lisa: "My daughter just got back from China ... one of the first things she mentioned: there were cameras everywhere." [15:38]
  • Owen: Describes teen pushback: “There’s a new movement of all these teens where they don’t show their face ... They know now when they’re going to college, they're starting to apply for jobs, they don’t want ‘duck lips’ things in their history.”
  • Leo: “Are we going to get used to the idea that everybody, everywhere is on camera at all times?”

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3. Data Ownership, Legislative Efforts, and Corporate Responsibility ([19:17] - [22:41])

• New U.S. bill (Health and Location Data Protection Act) seeks to ban companies from selling personal/health data to brokers.

  • Lisa: “Legislation like this requires us to make a really fundamental shift in our thinking about who data belongs to and what economic model works with it.” [20:53]

• X.com (formerly Twitter) asks the FTC to remove privacy oversight, arguing the company and product are “different” now.

  • Lisa: “You moved the tombstones, but you didn’t move the bodies!” [22:41] — a recurring episode quote referencing superficial changes that miss the core issues.

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4. World Cup and Surveillance Tech ("What Happens After?") ([22:48] - [24:50])

• $1 billion spent on World Cup surveillance, facial recognition—what happens to that infrastructure post-event?
  • Owen: “They’re not taking those cameras down.” [23:17]

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5. Anthropic’s Fable AI Returns: Safety, Pausing, U.S. Policy & AI Brand Positioning ([32:23] - [42:31])

• Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos—high-power AIs—were paused by the U.S. government due to safety concerns, then re-enabled after further lobbying and promises.

  • Jason: “Anthropic wants to be known as the Safe AI brand—and that could be worth a trillion dollars.” [35:36]
  • **Debate over AI’s true danger vs. the savvy in playing up risks for PR, and the ‘pause’ precedent for model releases.
  • Leo: “I don’t like the idea that the government, or any agency, can put its thumb on the scale.”

• Rumors of AI companies proposing to hand over 5% equity profits to the U.S. government, in part to offset public risk.

  • Owen: “Billionaires, give everyone free healthcare and people will get on board with your AI train.” [43:12]
  • Lisa: “If you decouple healthcare from jobs, people probably care less about losing their jobs to AI.” [46:17]

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6. Data Centers, AI Water/Energy Costs, and Public Perceptions ([47:01] - [54:39])

• AI’s “hidden costs”—skyrocketing energy bills, water usage, data center proliferation, environmental impact.
  • Owen: “When they’re putting a data center in every other town ... I’m like bro, how much data do we need? What do we need to know that you need that many?” [47:50]
  • Lisa: “It’s really easy to distract people from environmental concerns—just give them a big enough carrot.” [47:07]

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7. AI’s Value, Overhype, and Pushback: Technological Democratization vs. Hype Cycle ([49:39] - [63:51])

• Jason: “Today’s AI is like drafting a rookie—great potential, but it hasn't proven anything yet.” [49:50]
• The double-edged sword of expertise democratization (AI and search)—now everyone has access, but recognizing quality/credibility is harder than ever.
  • Lisa: “You have to get people the skills to know when they're connecting with real expertise or with a crackpot … or AI hallucination.” [51:29]
• The problem of “AI as average”—AI-generated content tips off its origin through a generic, homogenized writing style. [90:06]

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8. AI Search, Scraping, and the Publisher Dilemma ([57:42] - [65:13])

• Cloudflare moves to block AI bots scraping websites for training data; concerns about the sustainability of ad-supported publishing.
  • Leo: “Imagine if they’d done this to Google 15 years ago…” [58:02]
  • Lisa: “When Google aggregates your content into AI answers, it really hits your traffic.” [58:55]
• Google crams more AI overviews into search, alienating loyal users, as alternatives like DuckDuckGo see a usage bump. [63:58]

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9. AI Usage at Work: Token Maxxing, CFO Crackdowns, and AI Disillusionment ([71:08] - [78:05])

• Early attempts to drive employee AI use through gamified rewards ("token maxxing") led to runaway costs; now companies like Meta and Tesla are capping usage.
  • Jason: “We used to be about letting every flower bloom, now the CFOs are coming through with a lawnmower.” [73:33]
• AI is entering the “trough of disillusionment” as companies realize its limits—parallels with MoviePass and past tech hype cycles.
  • Lisa: “AI is in its MoviePass pricing era … and now everybody’s, like, right-sizing the resources.” [77:54]

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10. The Great RAM Shortage & AI Taxation: Truth, Greed & Tech Cycles ([140:49] - [151:14])

• AI-driven hardware cost increases—from RAM/SSD to phones and laptops—are pricing out consumers.
  • Owen: “There’s absolutely no reason besides greed and price gouging … Samsung, Micron are being sued for collusion, saying, ‘if we all raise the prices of RAM, we all make more money—and we’ll blame it on AI.’” [145:31]
• Jason: “There is a legitimate shortage of the chips—the demand is real, but it’s also an opportunity to hike prices.” [148:03]
• Discussion of BYD’s electric vehicle dominance and China’s capacity to leapfrog the U.S. on both cars and chips.

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11. Prediction Markets and Real-World Manipulation ([165:05] - [174:10])

• From betting on wildfires to manipulating airport temperature sensors, prediction markets are ripe for both insider trading and perverse incentives.
  • Leo: “You shouldn’t be able to have a bet on whether your town is going to burn down in a wildfire.”
  • Lisa: “Tragedy plus money is powerful. It’ll take a combination of a PR crisis and a very expensive outcome to spark regulation.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Lisa Schmeiser ([10:43]): “They now explicitly connect an individual to the data that they generate and argue that they ultimately have control over it. I think we’re going to see repercussions for that play out down the road.”
• Owen J.J. Stone ([145:31]): “There is absolutely no reason besides greed and price gouging. ... Samsung, Micron are all getting sued for collusion ... Now Apple users are just being robbed!”
• Leo ([90:41]): "It's the average of all of our voices."
• Owen ([43:12]): “Just tell me whatever percentage you’re gonna put away isn’t gonna go to the federal government ... just give free health care to every American citizen.”
• Jason Heiner ([35:36]): “What Anthropic realizes is what they can do is become known as the Safe AI brand. And that Safe AI brand could be worth a trillion dollars.”
• Lisa ([177:19]): “You should take that knowledge and go talk to a kid in your life... Show them how to use AI for more than just brownie recipes. Be ethical with these children. ... That is your PSA.”

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Important Timestamps

| Topic | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------------------|---------------------| | Supreme Court Privacy Ruling | 05:56 – 20:51 | | Social Surveillance & Teen Pushback | 12:50 – 18:54 | | Data Ownership, Warrants, and Corporate Lobbying| 19:17 – 22:41 | | World Cup Surveillance Tech | 22:48 – 24:50 | | Anthropic Fable AI Debate | 32:23 – 42:31 | | AI Economic Costs & Public Perception | 47:01 – 54:39 | | AI Disillusionment and Pricing | 71:08 – 78:05 | | Scraping & Publisher Responses | 57:42 – 65:13 | | AI Tax & RAM Shortage | 140:49 – 151:14 | | China’s BYD EV / Chips | 151:14 – 154:24 | | Prediction Markets Out of Control | 165:04 – 174:10 | | Final PSA by Owen J.J. Stone | 179:13 – End |

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Conclusion

This episode of TWiT is a wide-ranging, high-energy, and detail-rich look at how the collision of AI, surveillance, privacy, economics, and environmental impacts is reshaping not just the tech industry, but our daily lives. With sharp skepticism and plenty of context, the hosts show that tech isn’t just about the latest gadget, but about who controls data, sets the rules, and reaps the benefits—as well as who pays the price.

Closing note from Owen J.J. Stone ([179:13]):
"Go out and help somebody so they could use [AI] in the right way. Please spend some time doing that for somebody. ... As the adults in the room that know something, that's how you get the future to be something. Do that for me—and I appreciate and thank you. ... Another TWiT is in the can."

Transcript

[A]

It's time for Twitter this Week in Tech. We got a panel for you today. Lisa Schmeiser is here, Jason Heiner, and it's the return of. Oh, Dr. Owen JJ Stone. Lots to talk about. The Supreme Court protects your privacy for a change. Anthropic's fable is back and AI is costing us a lot. It's coming up next on Twitter. This episode is brought to you by Black Hat usa. If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail. Well, so does Black Hat. For nearly three decades it's been where the security industry's most rigorous research gets presented and pressure tested. More than 100 hands on trainings taught by practitioners who actually deployed in live environments, not lecturers reading from slides. And hundreds of peer reviewed briefings that go well past the overview into the real work across the four areas defining security right now. AI and autonomous threats, cyber conflict, systemic resilience and identity. This year, Black Hat's briefings pass includes all keynotes and main stage access plus business hall entry. You also get breakfast, lunch, Arsenal live tool demos on demand session access and admission to the midnight in the war room screening. Black Hat takes place from August 1st to the 6th in Las Vegas. If you want the depth this show gets into in person with the people doing the work, this is the room. And we'll be there too. Prices rise on July 17th, so book before then. Use the code TWIT for $200 off your briefings [e-mail] us26 that's B L A C K H A T.com us26

[B]

podcasts you love from people you trust.

[A]

This is TWIT. This is TWiT this Week at Tech. Episode 1091 recorded Sunday, July 5, 2026. But you didn't move the bodies. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Lisa Schmeisser is here from Nojitter.com hello Lisa.

[C]

Hi.

[B]

Thank you for having me back.

[A]

Always great to have you. She covers telecom and so forth at no Jitter and as always, welcome here. Jason Heiner also here. Jason's made the big move to AI editor in chief also at the deep view.com hi Jason. Hey.

[C]

Glad to be here.

[A]

Great to see you. Yes. Are you. Are you rooting for England or Mexico tonight? That's the question.

[C]

Is that tonight? That's tonight. I have not followed the World cup so much. I know it's not cool to say like I know everybody. People who didn't even know what the word soccer meant. You know, six months ago. Now are following it.

[A]

I notice I so cool to see soccer once every four years and then fall immediately out of love. But but briefly I love it. So hey, I think my. My loyalty is clear from my shirt. I am wearing a definitely a Mexican wow themed. Very cool. That is Aztec warrior, I believe. Now let us talk to somebody who is actually in the Philadelphia area where he has been assaulted by soccer fans. Mr. Owen J J Stone. Oh, doctor in the house. Hello, Owen.

[D]

Hey, Uncle Leo. Yes. If you have money for parking, come hang out. It's $180 for a regular vehicle, $700 for oversized. We got AI price and parking over here, buddy. Come on down, get yourself a $45 beer and 100 degree weather your surge.

[A]

Surge pricing right now the backyard. That's awesome. Oh, by was it crazy yesterday? It must have been.

[D]

I mean because it's amazing. I have a lot of friends when I did not it was too hot. It was like 105 degrees. I'm too big. I won't make it. I'll melt in the car by the time I got there. But everyone is out there. The streets are packed. Everybody's having a great time. It's. It's actually really amazing to see all the.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Talks and the Twitters and the live streams and everything.

[A]

Like that spirit is really good. And one of the things I love about this. It's kind of like the Olympics. You get all these countries together, including Iran, countries that are not normally, you know, friends of one another playing, being sports, like been like and playing the game. And I just think it's great.

[D]

And all the bars are full like

[A]

all the scotch whiskey and beer.

[D]

Yeah. I mean drinking Boston out of beer was one of the things I thought I'd never.

[A]

That's classic.

[D]

Read or see in my lifetime. Classic. That was amazing.

[A]

I'm like, you saw they were out of all the beer except Bud Light.

[D]

Even at the end of the day

[A]

to make a decision, you know, some would say that's not beer. All right, well, we're back in business with. With Fable. Fable is. Is back the. We're going to talk about that in just a little bit. The Supreme Court ended its week with a rash of decisions. We talk a little bit about that. Google paying billions in fines. There's a lot of topics and of course many of us will be paying billions to Apple for anything any new hardware thanks to AI. So a bunch of big stories to get to. Let's start with The Supreme Court story, because I think this is maybe more important than it's getting credit for. The Supreme Court ruled the geofencing warrants violate the Fourth Amendment. This comes from law enforcement asking, well, in this case, Google, but I think other companies in general, things like, hey, give us all the people who are within a mile of the 711 that got robbed the other night, so we can just see who's there. These are big fishing expeditions. Justice Kagan, who wrote the majority opinion, said that sensitive data scooped up by these warrants counts as a Fourth Amendment search and offers individuals a reasonable expectation of privacy, Even if they're in a public area. In other words, it's, it's wrong. It was six to three against the government. Good news, right, Jason?

[C]

I mean, yeah, upholding privacy.

[A]

The US Kind of shocking.

[C]

It is sort of shocking. You know, the US has had this long history of, of privacy going back to like the, of defending privacy. And yet, like modernly, businesses have certainly been able to be on the winning side of most of the court decisions and governments. And then in the past couple decades, government, you know, has been on the side of, of being able to do sort of almost what it wants to, to invade the privacy of, of citizens. And so see, you know, any. Anything that helps protect citizens from overreach by government or corporations. I think, you know, as, as people living in this country, which all of us are, have to view is a good thing.

[A]

Yeah. This the case. I don't like to read the details of the case often because then people get influenced by whether the heinousness of the crime or how much the guy deserved to go to jail. That kind of distracts from the overall importance of this for all of us. Not necessarily this bank robber who got caught and actually pled guilty. Owen, I guess the only justification for this is it is a very useful tool in catching people. And they caught a bank robber by doing this.

[D]

So I'm not against crime per se.

[A]

You're not against crime?

[D]

I'm not against crime per se.

[A]

Okay.

[D]

I'm living in the current scheme of America where the last time America got free, apparently we had to do a lot of crime to get that freedom. Right. Rebellion.

[A]

That's a good point. That's a good point.

[D]

I've never been against criminal activity. Don't mean don't take a life.

[A]

Throwing tea in the harbor dressed up as an Indian is not exactly crime

[B]

is defined by the state. But if the exact. Isn't doing it in a way that is that that meets your principles, then

[D]

yeah, I'm against hurting women and children, but everything else might be on the table. I don't know what's going on in the world. Faraday, cage with me at all times from my phone because I never know what I might accidentally do something. I am so excited about this because the way that the Flock camera systems are moving and they're starting to pull in Bluetooth data and things like that, I'm hoping that this ruling could help protect us from that which is outside of the scope right now where it doesn't have any kind of regulation. They're just throwing in things willy nilly. But this is great for that in my mind, going forward in the future, when someone comes to try and put something forth to stop them from just collecting information and sharing it openly with these Flock cameras and the systems that they're putting in. I appreciate this.

[A]

On the general front, the government had said, look, every, you know, turning on location data is voluntary. The bad guy in this case had turned on his Google location history.

[D]

Most criminals are not smart. I mean, remember the guy that robbed the bank and he wore the BK glow in the dark shoes and he got caught in the woods because his shoes were lighting up. I mean, criminals are not known to be.

[C]

It's the smart ones you gotta worry about. The ones that aren't smart, like, they don't worry me. It's the ones that are really smart that I worry about.

[B]

In David Simon's excellent book, Homicide Life A Year on the Killing Streets, it was the basis for Homicide. It kicked open the door. We all know the David Simon story. One of the passages that stands out early on is he's like, look, criminals are dumb. If they weren't dumb, they wouldn't be

[A]

criminals or they would choose a crime that is less likely to get caught nowadays.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Don't rob a bank.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's what bitcoin is for. Come on.

[D]

In the stock market and insider trading,

[A]

there's so many better ways. Start a podcast network. You want to steal. Wait a minute. That's wrong.

[C]

The smart ones end up heads of state and leaders of industry.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

White collar crime. Yeah.

[B]

I think one of the most interesting aspects of this ruling is them putting forth the idea that people actually own their individual data, which is I. Which I think we're kind of sleeping on that, because that really opens the door to all sorts of interesting developments. If and or when somebody decides to go after companies that they feel are profiting off of their data without their approval, their control, or their cut, we now have something in a Supreme Court decision that explicitly connects an individual to the data that they generate and argues that they ultimately have control over it. And I think we're going to see repercussions for that play out down the road.

[A]

Now, what about the government argued that people should not have an expectation of privacy when they are in public? That's kind of, that's the argument for flock cameras as well. By the way, we're learning that these flock cameras, which are have ALPRS automatic license plate readers on them in many communities. There's one right outside my door here, as a matter of fact, many communities have these. You know, it started with red light cameras. The problem is the flock database is national. Law enforcement often accesses it to follow people out of state for committing crimes in a state that are not a crime in another state. Also lately we've seen that these flock cameras are also being installed with things like Bluetooth snarfers, which as you may or may not know, as you trundle down the street, all your Bluetooth devices are advertising saying, I'm here, I'm here. You want to join? And so you can ask, somebody drives by a flock camera, pick up a huge amount of data from them. We're seeing more and more technology is allowing more and more of this kind of invasion of privacy. So it's, it's encouraging to me that the supreme courts did, did not say, hey, just because you're in public doesn't mean you don't have some expectation of privacy. You do not. You still have a privacy right.

[D]

Yeah, they like to film like, you know those auditors that go out there on the sidewalk and they film people and they try to get somebody bad to another film.

[A]

They.

[D]

But at least I can see them doing it. A lot of the times you see a flat camera or something like that, you think it's just a camera. You don't know that it's there when someone's swiping and stealing your data. You don't, you have, you're not even aware of it at least when someone's filming you on the street, like, don't do that. I can see that you're doing it. I know I can turn my head and walk away if I want to.

[C]

I don't want to be in your

[D]

view of your camera.

[B]

If you see someone, the meta glasses, you're like, oh boy.

[D]

Exactly. Yes. Even though now they've done the thing where they take the light out so you don't even know the recording anymore,

[A]

which is meta's take no, Meta still has the.

[D]

No, not Meta doesn't do it. There's other companies.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

And certain. There's services like my Facebook. There's a guy down the street from me. Apparently, that does it for 100.

[A]

Oh, really? You can get the light taken out of these? Yep.

[D]

You go to them 20 minutes.

[A]

Is that the same guy who was going around saying the fire TV sticks a few years ago?

[D]

Leo, I'm not trying to snitch on anybody because there's guys out here doing service. If you're on Facebook, marketplace, it's only 100 bucks. Take 20 minutes, Uncle Leo. That's all I'm trying to let you know.

[A]

Hey, Meta, take a picture of that guy right there. That guy. He's up to no good. But I do think we're gonna have. We're gonna have these, aren't we? In the next five to 10 years, these are going to be ubiquitous, these cameras and glasses.

[B]

You think? I mean, we knocked them off of people's faces 10 years ago and made fun of them.

[A]

We called them glass holes.

[B]

Everyone's got, like, a real nostalgia thing going for 2016 right now. We can bring it back.

[D]

They look better now. The problem before is when you look to Scoble, you're like, what are you doing? Yeah. You look like a cyborg. Like, you. Like, it's supposed to flip up and hit a thing.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

It's. Now it's just a pair of sunglasses. You can get them tinted and they look normal. They blend in. Like I said, once you.

[A]

Kylie Jenner has it.

[B]

This makes me mad because I love my Ray Ban Wayfarers and I was wearing. I was wearing before Meta got into bed with them. So I'm.

[C]

They've ruined the Wayfarers for you.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So are we going to get used to the idea that everybody, everywhere is on camera at all times? I mean, it's sort of the case if you're a high school kid now, you know, that you can't really get away with anything.

[C]

Yeah, Well, I mean, that is, if you live in China, you're, you know, you. That's the reality you've lived with for the, you know, decade. Right.

[A]

Like.

[C]

Or the uk. So I. I think that these things are. Are less governed by regulations and more by, like, norms, culture, expectations.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

And so. And I think that we sort of. They wear us down over time with that. Because people in China and the UK also didn't like it at first. Right now you sort of never hear anything about it. I think that's probably more likely what happens in the rest of the world.

[B]

Yeah. My daughter just got back from two weeks in China, and one of the first things she mentioned bear in mind, she's still out of her mind with jet lag, and so there's a lot of incoherence. But one of the first things she

[A]

mentioned, are you my mommy is.

[B]

She was like, there were cameras everywhere. We couldn't go any place without noticing all of the cameras. And to her, that was just really, really strange. And the fact that it was so normalized, I think sort of set her spidey senses going. I do agree that American teenagers have pretty much grown up with a really, really different relationship to the ubiquity of cameras and a hyper awareness that anytime you're out in public, anything you do can be quickly disseminated and go viral. What I will be interested in seeing is whether we'll get any sort of countercultural pushback from young people who are like, this is not how we're supposed to live, or if they'll find a way to hack or subvert it. Because this is what young people do to. To try to set their identities separately from the generations that came before them.

[A]

So, yes, oh, doctor has donned his sunglasses so that he may speak freely. We don't know who he is.

[D]

So my daughter is in that group of. There used to be the girls who have the duck face, and they want to, you know, be grown and all that kind of stuff. There's a new movement of all these teens where they don't show their face. They just look off to the side at everything with all their experiences. So if they're at the beach, they're not the girl sitting at the beach in a bikini. It's the girl looking off at the beach. It's the guy looking off at the beach. And I'm like, so what's the matter? She's like, we're tired of all our faces. Yes, it's all pretty.

[A]

This is great.

[B]

So instead of being the object of the gays, they're inviting you to see their gays. That's so interesting.

[D]

But you can tell the difference in the kids that do it versus the ones that don't when you're involved with, like, these kids. But, like, it's a. It's. It's. It's becoming more mainstream of these kids because they know now when they're going to college, they're starting to apply for jobs, and they don't want to have the pouty face, duck lips things in their history and they don't want to delete their experiences, so they're changing their perspective of things. So to what you were saying, I do think that there is some kind of normalcy getting back to the world in nature and wanting to have real experiences and just not be seen all the time, especially when you're putting yourself front and forward on the Internet.

[A]

And yet, you know, Larry Ellison said this week that, well, all those cameras are good. It makes people behave. They're on their best behavior now.

[B]

Yeah, he's been kind of on that since the 90s,

[A]

I seem to remember him. If you get over it, privacy is dead. Right? But that was many years ago.

[C]

I mean, some of the tech CEOs have, have said things famously like if you don't, you know, want to, you know, have the technology get you in trouble, then don't do anything bad.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Famously. Right. So it's like, yeah, not surprising. Right.

[B]

And yet these people are the same ones that complain when they're like, young people don't party like they used to. They're not drinking like they used to, they're not risk takers like they used to be. And what is the incentive where if you do this sort of stuff, you have no control over other people recording you, uploading you, you have no recourse with any of the companies that have gotten impressions and traffic based on the idiocy. You have no social repercussions. Like you have no social recourse for cleaning it up. I think these things are kind of linked. If you're going to heavily surveil a population, you're going to change how they behave.

[A]

So, yeah. There is a new bill in Congress sponsored by Elizabeth Warren and Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, the, the Health and Location Data Protection Act. Now it's been around for a few years. They have updated it to ban companies from selling data to brokers, including health data. They've. Now, I think this is tilting in windmills because I can't imagine Congress actually passing this. So maybe write to your Congress critter and say, hey, we like this idea. We need this. There is no federal law protecting your data privacy. And there really needs to be.

[B]

If it's your property, which the Supreme Court just established, then shouldn't you be able to protect it?

[A]

The bill would require the Federal Trade Commission to enact rules within 180 days, would allow the FTC, state attorneys general, and effective individuals to sue to enforce it. That private right of actions, I have mixed feelings about it, but it can be very, very Effective. It would also earmark a billion dollars to the FTC for enforcement over the next 10 years. Do you think it has a shot? I think we all need to write our members of Congress, our Congress critters, and say we need federal privacy protection.

[D]

It's, it's sad that we have to ask for that.

[A]

I don't.

[D]

It should.

[A]

But this is the thing about billionaires when saying that. And members of con, they're protected.

[C]

They can have it.

[A]

They have it.

[C]

They have it.

[A]

So they don't get what we're talking about.

[B]

Well, you take a look at how data was framed for so long, which is data is the new oil. And oil was an extractive resource who belonged to the person who could figure out how to get it out of the ground and sell it. And so we've always looked at data the same way as it's an extractive resource that belongs to the person who figures out how to collect it, bundle it and sell it. Like the legislation, like this requires us to make a really fundamental shift in our thinking about who data belongs to and what economic model works with it.

[A]

And if you're wondering who wants this, the X has just petitioned X.com, elon Musk's rebranded Twitter has just petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to drop their oversight of privacy on X. This goes back to Twitter days FTC had found that a coding error had caused Twitter to improperly share users contact information for ad targeting. Contact information that by the way, like your phone number, you had given Twitter for two factor authentication. They were then taking that phone number and selling it on X is subject to right now to costly independent audits. And the FTC has the authority to man documents to ensure compliance with data privacy laws. Without further legal action. They could just say, hey, give it to us right now. X says, your honor, this order imposes burdensome costs and we shouldn't have to do it anymore because it's now X, it's not Twitter anymore. And by the way, GDPR is taking care of that so you don't have to. So they want the FTC to drop that again. Something to write your, I don't know, write your member of Congress or something

[B]

that has a real poltergeist. You move the body tombstones, but you didn't move the bodies.

[A]

Hey, and we built a house right on top of it. Incidentally, we talk about the World cup going on right now. Speaking of surveillance, in order to be safe in the World Cup, $1 billion was spent on security systems including face recognition. Fast Company asks a legit question. What happens after the games end to all of this data? These cameras, you think they're going to take them down?

[D]

No.

[A]

You know, doctor.

[C]

Ask your glasses, Owen, ask your glasses. What are they going to do with the data?

[D]

I'm not wasting any water. Jason, you're trying to trick. I will not be a fool. All right, to your games out here. You're trying to trick me up. Now, the thing that cracks my throat about that is whenever Elon says anything, it makes me laugh. He's like, we don't have to do this. FCC doesn't have to worry about it.

[A]

We're going to be good.

[D]

Anything he says, I want. The exact opposite of yes.

[A]

I agree.

[D]

I can't. You know, Leo, I haven't been on the show in, what, four or five years?

[A]

No, it hasn't been that long. I know it feels that.

[D]

Well, three years, two years. I've just extended up to. I say, I haven't been on here in 20 years. Uncle Leo. All I remember is forever. When I was on this show, I made a shirt. We're not going to Mars. That man promised me Mars by 2020.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[D]

Six extra years. I sold hundreds of those shirts, and we still aren't anywhere halfway to Mars. Uncle Leo, we're not living on Mars. We're not sniffing Mars. This man just be saying stuff, and you know everybody's gonna have a free robot in their house. Okay, where's the metal coming from, Jason? You want all this stuff built? You want to just destroy? You want to drill through whole planet, end up in China just to get some extra batteries? Where is it coming from? It's not going to happen. We ain't even on Mars, and y' all want to believe anything that's been happening.

[A]

Do you have any of those T shirts left? I think they're very.

[D]

I mean, I got one that's still snug on me. I rocking. I put it on because we are. We have not made it to Mars yet. I wear.

[B]

You really need to, like, do a limited drop T shirt this year, too. This is. This is how you pay for your next water system.

[A]

I just say I'm glad that they finally put security fencing around the. Around the reflecting pool, because that was such a hazard. People falling in, dunking their toes in it. It's just about time, that's all.

[D]

Well, did you read that they're trying to get rid of the cherry blossoms? You want golf course?

[B]

No, no, no, no.

[D]

Go Google it. I don't want to make you upset? We got stuff to talk about. That's not till September. He's going to wait till after the. After the summer.

[A]

Yeah. Then after the summer's depredation, who needs trees? They just get in the way of the golf balls.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[D]

A gift of 100 years from Japan.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Who needs it? All right, let's take a little break so we can cool off here a little bit. You're watching this Week at Tech. Oh, and Doc. Oh, Dr. Back, baby.

[D]

And Leo.

[A]

We've been missing you, sir. You know, the last time you were on, I was playing the vuhuzela. Still,

[D]

that I need. I'll cross the bridge, man. That I.

[A]

It's great to see you again, my friend.

[C]

Zella's over data centers. There you go.

[A]

Yeah, you know what? They're people suing now. Those data centers are so annoying. They're worse than vuvuzelas.

[D]

They're loud.

[A]

They're loud and they're whiny.

[C]

Lisa, aren't they louder than vuvuzelas, though? I don't know.

[A]

Maybe not.

[C]

That might be a toss up.

[A]

They're pretty loud. They're pretty loud. Ladies, gentlemen, Unleasha Schmeisser, also here from NoJitter.com and the great Jason Heiner. His new newsletter, the Deep View.com calm. Did you go to the. The big AI conference Alex Cantrowitz had in San Francisco?

[C]

That. That is probably the only one I have not been to in 26. I have been to them all five out of the last six weeks. I was at events.

[A]

Well, we'll talk about Fable when we come back, because Fable's back. This episode of this Week in Tech, brought to you by Thinkst Canary. I love my Thinks Canary Think. I would show it to you, but it's busy working. And the nice thing about the Things Canary, when it's busy working, it's quiet. Unless somebody has broken into your network. What is the Things Canary? It's a honeypot. Beautifully designed, perfectly designed to impersonate almost anything. It can be a SharePoint server, an Exchange server, a Windows XP machine, a Windows 11 server. It could be a Linux server. You can light up all the services like a Christmas tree, or just have one or two handpicked services. The Thinx Canary could also create files that impersonate the real thing. Files that look like word documents. You could put them anywhere. You can put them on your local hard drives. You can put them on your cloud. As soon as that thinkscanary is accessed, if somebody accesses one of those Lore Files, I have blur files on our Google Drive, for instance. You know, Excel spreadsheets called payroll information, things like that. Or if somebody tries to brute force that fake internal SSH server I've got running over there, that's not an SSH server, that's a Thinks Canary, a honeypot. And it will immediately let you know you have a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that really matter. And you get them any way you want. Email, sms. It supports system console, it supports web hooks, they have an API. I mean really, any way you want alerts or all of them. Because I'll tell you what, when that thing's Canary goes off, it means there's something going on. There's somebody wandering around your system. Those files, that fake server, it could be a SCADA device. Those are. They don't look vulnerable to a hacker. They look like something a hacker absolutely has to knock on. So it's very easy to set up. You just choose a profile for your things Canary device. They're designed to be absolutely secure and absolutely indistinguishable from, from the real thing down to the Mac address. I mean, they really are good. Then you register with a hosted console from set up the monitoring and the notifications and then you can just relax, sit back. Attackers who breached your network or malicious insiders. Any adversary who's in your network snooping around will make themselves known. They can't help it by accessing your things Canary. And you got them. You need this thing. How many do you need? Well, you should at least have one per network segment. A big bank might have hundreds. Small business like ours, a handful. I'll give you an example though. If you go to Canary Tools Twit, 7,500 bucks a year will get you five things Canaries, also your own hosted console. You get upgrades, you get support and you get maintenance. And if you use the code twit in the how did you hear about us box, you'll get 10% off. 10% off. Not just for the first year, but for as long as you own your Things Canaries. One other thing. There is no risk. You can always return your thinks canaries. They have a 2 month 60 day money back guarantee for a full refund. I should tell you though, we've been talking about the things Canary for more than a decade now. 10 years. It was 10 years back in May, I think. But in all that time, in all that time, nobody has ever once asked for the refund. Not once. I check with things every once in a while. Anybody Ask for the refund. Nope. You know why? Because once you get one of these things, you realize, how did I live without it? How did I survive without this visit? Canary Tools Twit Enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us? Box. 10% off. Canary Tools Twit. We thank them so much for their support. So it was June 9 that the Trump administration abruptly, a Friday afternoon announced that Anthropic could not let non US citizens use either Mythos, its high end security AI, or Fable, the kind of consumer version of that. Now the problem is, of course, Anthropic doesn't know if its users are US citizens or not. They never asked about that. So they just had to shut it down. It had been shut down since June 9th. On June 30th, three weeks later, the US lifted those restrictions and Fable and Mythos came back online. I have to say, it's been out now for what, five days? And I've been playing with it. A lot of people playing with it Fable and are very impressed. Now Anthropic had to do a little bit of PR with the president. We're not sure exactly what they offered. One of the things we know they've done is they've, they've made the protections even stronger. But they were very good to begin with. They had a classifier that will basically prevent you from doing anything, anything too serious with it. Certainly not bioweapons research, AI research. You can't use it to attack systems. Alex Samos, we had him on intelligent machines when this first happened and he's been lobbying. He actually created a site called Free Fable.org with hundreds of signatures from some of the best known people on computer science saying, please, you know, this is political. This has nothing to do with technology. Stamos says there's a lot to unpack here. Anthropic is bearing some hard truths and careful political language. First of all, they verified that none of the jailbreaks that were performed by Amazon and others using not jailbreaks but security flaws discovered by Anthropic Fable were, were things that other models couldn't do. Anthropic pointed that out. Even their, even their most inexpensive models like Haiku could do the same thing. They also said there's, there is going to be. The U.S. department of Commerce's center for AI Standards and Innovation would start to enforce safeguards on models and models that aren't safe will not be released. Now there is a problem. Stamos points out there's no way to know If a model's safe and we don't have the technology to demonstrate it, and that's become very, very clear. Anthropic also cast some shade on Amazon for narcing on them. But the biggest point Stamos makes is this, he said calls it. I think he's a soccer fan. An own goal for the United States. He said, we will see how bad US Models get over the next six months. And it's a real opportunity for the Chinese models, and we've already seen that. We've seen a lot of people move to Chinese models. It's made a lot of people wonder, should we invest our company in a model that could be rug pulled at any moment Now, Jason, you cover this. I wonder how much blame is Ghost Anthropic for all of the rhetoric around how dangerous Mythos was to begin with.

[C]

Boy, I. I'll. I'm going to be honest with you, Leo. I. I'm of two minds of this, and I sort of go back and forth on it. I think the last time I was on the show, I mentioned that, you know, Anthropic didn't have the computing to run it if they wanted to. Right. So, like, they remember that since they first announced in April that they were. That they announced Mythos that they've gone out and raised a bunch of funds because they didn't have the computing to run this thing.

[A]

They actually made a deal with elon Musk's X AI for. For compute. Right. $1 billion a month in compute.

[C]

That's right. Colossus, their giant, you know, compute machine, which was supposed to. All of Xai was supposed to use up, but Xai has not been blowing the doors off. So they have got electronics, a lot of extra compute lying around. So, like, well, why don't we just go ahead and sell it?

[D]

Right.

[A]

I think MET is doing that now, too, by the way, they announced this week they're going to start selling capacity.

[C]

Yeah, that's right. There's a lot more money to be made off selling capacity probably than. Than models, but that's a whole nother story. So the thing is, they didn't have the compute to run it if they wanted to. So going out and saying how dangerous it was was clearly one. It was a marketing ploy. Ploy is maybe a strong word, but it was a. It was a. It was a smart marketing thing to do. That said, I have since heard from some cure some security people of like, no, this thing runs through stuff like Swiss cheese, like, it can go and find Vulnerabilities and stuff that like, we've never, that we had never been found before. And so that sobered me up a little bit. But, but I think maybe the bigger, I'll say there's two things that are like the bigger picture about this thing. One is that models are commoditizing really quickly. And so OpenAI and Anthropic want to go public. They're not going to be able to come become trillion dollar companies just by selling the latest and greatest models. There's just not going to be enough profit in it. But what Anthropic is doing, and I think what Anthropic realizes is what they can do is become known as the Safe AI brand. And that Safe AI brand could be worth trillion dollars. Right.

[A]

So this is, this is good for them. This was good for them, is what you're saying. The Trump ban was absolutely, it was absolutely.

[C]

It's very good for them. And here's the other thing that it's good for almost by accident is that, you know, we've heard and probably nobody more than Dario Amade, you know, has said, you know, we would pause our stuff if everybody else paused theirs for this, for, for the, in the case of safety. Right.

[A]

That was the strangest post. He said that right before they released Fable.

[C]

Well, he's been saying it consistently. He has actually been saying it consistently for about a year.

[A]

But nobody's pausing. So nobody's pausing.

[C]

He knew none of them were right. It's a very safe thing to say because none of them were right. And yet, like this sort of crazy out of the blue thing that probably happened because somebody in the US Government, like this thing got out there and somebody in the US Government like set it loose on some, some US Government system and went, oh, crap, like this thing just blitzed through all of our security and then convinced somebody, we need to, we need to pause this.

[A]

Pause it. We got a problem.

[C]

Houston, they achieved the pause, though. Here's, here's the thing is they achieved what hasn't. No, you know, safety advocates, no, you know, Dario Amade, nobody has been able to achieve, which they did actually pause it. And then since then, remember, OpenAI's released GPT 5.6, which has now also been paused and is still paused, has not been unpaused yet.

[A]

That's a good point.

[C]

And so the US Government is sort of like backed their way into this. But I think as we talk, remember we talked earlier about those sort of like norms and expectations if the norm and expectation becomes, look, before, you know, These labs are pushing out these super powerful models that could wreak havoc on, havoc on God knows what. Like, let's actually set up a regular expectation that, okay, hopefully it's not just the US Government, but maybe some kind of like third party agency or something that does these evals and create sort of some, some safety motions before these things are released. That would be a good thing. And I think the models are getting powerful enough that it would be important and very useful and smart.

[A]

I am exactly where you are of two minds. On the one hand, this is in my opinion the most consequential technology to come down the pipe since computers were invented. On the other hand, yeah, it could be disastrous if this thing is so good at finding exploits that a nitwit like me could just say, hey, let's break into Fort Knox, you know, I mean, that's problematic. So I understand the risk, but at the same time, I don't like the idea that the government or any government agency, I don't, will have the opportunity to put its thumb on the scale. Right, yeah.

[C]

Remember, Europe freaked out about this too, by the way. Europe was like, wait, you're pausing the model for everybody else. This thing was out for several days. Like our adversaries have it, they're, they can attack our systems and the US Government is, is holding on to it. And meanwhile we're at risk because there are people out there that already have access to this and could really, you know, run through our systems like Swiss cheese.

[A]

Right.

[C]

They didn't love that.

[A]

And then OpenAI apparently has, is talked about giving the Trump administration 5% of all the AI companies. You know, it's, it's a sort of a bribe sort of. And I think then there's the concern that, well, maybe this isn't about technical skills, but this is about who's going to, who's going to pay the President, who's going to give, give. I mean, obviously it doesn't go into Trump's pocket. Maybe not so obviously.

[C]

I'll give you the non cynical version of that. Just as a, just as a counterpoint, Leo, to like the, where they are aware of the fact that they are losing the narrative. OpenAI and anthropic and Google are very aware of the fact that they are losing the narrative among the broader population that people hate, they hate big tech.

[A]

It's kind of part and parcel of the same thing.

[C]

61% of Americans have a negative opinion of AI. Right. Like that's not a secret. I think it's probably pretty conservative you know, in general. And so I think what their thing is, is like, look, this could be create a lot of economic value. It also is going to create all kinds of challenges if it does. And if they become public companies, if they, they're like one of the policy proposals. And I had a, I had an interview with the person who wrote this at OpenAI, the research, the researcher who wrote this that wrote some policy proposals of like, what are the ways we could make AI actually useful to, to people that it could, it could help with the sort of job loss, with the economic inequality, all of that. And one of these things these researchers proposed that eventually, you know, Altman and the others signed off on was that what if we took, when we do go public, what if we took a chunk of our shares and we allocated them to the US Government and it essentially gets like redeployed to the American people. Now how does that. The devil's in the details, right? They didn't explain how.

[A]

Maybe it wouldn't just be open.

[C]

Maybe it's.

[A]

According to the Financial Times, a proposed arrangement would involve other USAI companies handing over its similar stake. Not what I, I don't know who that means.

[C]

I think it means they're saying like, we're, if we do it, we'd like to see everybody else do it. I think what, what, what? I, I don't know how practical that is, but what I do think is interesting is that like, this wasn't I think just like a Sam Altman driven thing or an executive driven thing. Like, this was driven by researchers who are quite altruistic, right? Who are like, they're, they're punching the time card, right? They're not making billions off of, off of their stock, you know, but they are sincere about, like, what are the ways that could, that we could think creatively because we're going to. This thing could get really, you know, big in a way that could cause a lot of job dislocation, could, you know, redistribute wealth in negative ways, which is already a challenge going to appeal,

[A]

appease am the American populace that, oh, hey, we're getting 5%. Is that going to make you feel better? Owen, Let me.

[D]

Two things. Let me, let me. First, let me bend the knee to Jason for a second. Okay. So I'm building something with a friend. And when Fable came out, we did more in three days than we did amazing weeks. And I'm not lying, like, it, it was on steroids. And when they took it away, it was like, you know, taking the baby's pacifier way. Like we were crying. I was like, oh my God, I'm back to being stupid. So, yes, it's powerful when you use it for the right thing. It does matter. And it was worth all the water. Jason. Now, when it comes to billionaires giving back to the American people, I've been waiting for trickle down economics since before I was born, sir. So unless you're going to tell me something useful and direct and clear right now, they're taking away Social Security, Medicaid, can't get no free education. If billionaires want me to get on board with your AI train, tell me that whatever percentage you're going to put away isn't going to go to the federal government. Just tell me you're going to give free health care to every American citizen in the United States of America.

[A]

What if they did that?

[D]

If you told me that, that would get every doofus that doesn't know anything about anything on your side. Instead of filling up buses with guys with yellow T shirts saying, drink the AI water. It's fine. And don't worry about your electric bill. It's fine. Fine. And don't worry about the 42 twin turbo jet helicopter engines they got running in your local city inheritage. It's fine. Maybe, just maybe, I would get on board, but other than that, I want my water, I want fresh air, and I don't want the decibels popping over 100 in the middle of the night because somebody wants to know how to make brownies.

[A]

They're very good brownies, though.

[D]

I mean, they better be.

[B]

But he's not wrong about. He's not wrong about the minimal benefits and the huge.

[D]

You want to make better brownies, substitute water for milk, add an extra egg. Bob's your uncle.

[A]

I also wonder, though, 5% of what? Because I don't think these companies are making money. It's 5% of their stock, I guess.

[C]

Right, right.

[B]

That's money that doesn't exist yet.

[A]

It's an agreement that they're also losing money. Right? Nobody. There's no AI company out there that's actually. Yeah, I mean, positive income.

[C]

Google. Right. But Google, they make money in advertising and, and their cloud business. Right. And so they're selling cloud capacity to others, including.

[A]

Oh, that's a good point. If you're making the picks and axes in dungarees for the gold rush, then you're making some.

[C]

Nvidia is making a lot of money off all the AI companies.

[A]

5% of Nvidia probably would pay for the federal Health care, Health care, everything.

[B]

All right, get on it.

[D]

I'm just saying you got to attach it to something that's dumb enough that everybody can understand.

[C]

It's fair. It's true.

[D]

Yeah, because everything else you just said just sounds like government talking about what they always been talking about. Oh, well, you know, he's not worth a trillion dollars. Oh, doctor, he can't be taxed on that. It's not real. But how come? He could borrow it to buy this fourth and. And not pay any taxes on it. And then again, I understand how it works because, you know, I mean, I don't. I ain't paid tax in 20 years. Uncle Leo. Knock on wood.

[A]

Wait a minute now, Owen, now you shouldn't be saying that out loud now. There might be people listening.

[D]

I'm clear with the irs. They know what I'm doing. The Church of O Doctor Is running

[A]

strong here

[D]

little family foundation.

[C]

We're doing everything.

[D]

Doing everything I'm supposed to do. Uncle Leo, regular people are out here getting robbed and they're not getting anything for it. So let's gonna give education or healthcare. And healthcare would be the thing, even more so than education. Not everyone wants to go to college. Right, but if you just gave them free health care, that would be the carrot that will get everybody on board for what you're trying to push through in this AI revolution.

[B]

Especially since they're so explicitly linked to employment and you have all of these AI big brains going. We're going to eliminate some. So many white collar jobs, we're going to eliminate the jobs of the educated. Jobs, jobs, jobs are going away. It's inevitable. You can't stop it. And all people hear is, I will be poor. And the first time I break a leg, you may as well just shoot me in the head because I can't afford to get it. I can't afford to get it set. So decouple health care from the employment market and people will probably care a lot less when they lose their jobs.

[A]

Well, yeah, I don't know if that's going to be enough though, to convince people to like big tech and AI and data.

[B]

I mean, they love fracking at this point. Like, people protest.

[A]

You just need a good ad campaign.

[B]

People protested fracking and you have folks who are like, my groundwater. It's terrible, but it's. And, and like states now have earthquakes that didn't used to have earthquakes. Thanks to fracking, there were the same environmental considerations. And in the end, all you have to say to Americans is, but this keeps fuel and power cheap. And they'll be like, oh, okay. And if you give somebody a big enough carrot with AI they won't care about the environmental impact anymore. Like, they care right now because they're paying horrible utility bills, and they can see that, the visible degradation of the water. But it's really easy to distract people from environmental concerns.

[D]

So I would generally agree with you. Fracking is a terrible example, because fracking doesn't come down main street in your rural town when we're. When they're putting a data center in every other town and every other area and close to major cities and suburbs and boroughs. You're not fracking everywhere. There's only certain places where fracking is palatable. Right. Or useful. They're trying to put data centers every three miles. And I'm like, bro, how much. How much data do we need? What do you. Who are you trying to learn from? What do we need to know that you need that many?

[B]

Like, they need a blondies recipe. It's not just the brownies anymore.

[D]

We've got, like 42 times what China has for data centers. And they're out there putting them in the ocean using solar power and other things to power this word is out here cooking with Crisco, taking up the temperature, messing up the planet. Yes. I'm looking at you, Jason. I gotta combat your positivity with the balance of the world. Okay.

[B]

All right. Oh, and you have convinced me that it was a bad. That the fracking was a bad example. Thank you.

[D]

Thank you.

[A]

I guess at this point, I'm not going to say anything like, well, isn't AI like, going to change the world? And isn't it a great technology?

[C]

And I guess you could.

[B]

I want to hear how that goes.

[A]

We're going to kind of. Well, I think we're going to. Isn't there a risk that we're going to lose something that could be really significant if.

[D]

If it was going to make a Tony Stark arc where, like, this little box is going to generate enough power.

[A]

We don't know.

[D]

Like, again, you have to start trying to sell dumb people on real, imaginary things that would help them.

[A]

Tell them, can we go to Mars?

[D]

Yeah, exactly. People love Tony Stark. They love DC comics. Like, look, we're gonna make an arc reactor. This one thing's gonna be better than 40 nuclear plants. Only if you let us use AI and they're like, oh, you know, Tony Stark kind of saved the world twice. So I'm. I'd be on board that. You got to trick people.

[A]

So you're saying it's a PR problem? Basically.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Well, it's a big PR problem. I think the way to think about. Sorry, go ahead, Lisa, go ahead, go ahead.

[B]

No, you're the one who runs an AI publication, so you're the subject matter expert here.

[C]

I'll just say it, I'll say it briefly was just that I think the way to think about AI. Today's AI, it's like anything when, it's like when you draft a rookie in the NBA or in the mlb, right? You draft the rookie, they're like the five star prospect. You're like, they're going to do everything. They're going to break every record. They're going to be the, you know, the best ever at their position or whatever. And you think that they're just going to be able to do everything. AI is kind of like that right now because it's like known. Yeah, it's exactly. It's still unknown.

[A]

Open book. Yeah.

[C]

There are a lot of things that, that are being promised about what AI is going to do that we're going to decide. You know what, it's probably not going to be able to do that, but it's going to be really great. In fact better than anything we've seen at a couple other, at a couple things. Right. Like a great prospect might be. And so there's still a lot of, you know, that that has to play out over the coming.

[A]

It's all potential right now. It's all unknown potential.

[C]

It's all potential. But here's the one thing that I think I'll just, and I'll wrap it is just that the one thing I think we should think about that is benefits everybody with AI is that it is. And this word gets use too much, but I am going to use it. The democratization of expertise. There are a lot of things that the expertise used to be locked behind. Access to very, you know, specialized experts, people or institutions that not everybody got. And without that expertise, you, you really didn't have a chance to compete at a lot of things or to, to be able to advance in a way.

[A]

There's a precedent for that. I mean that's what YouTube and Google search have done, haven't they? They've democratized information.

[B]

Well, you've created a new problem which is you have to figure out how do you give people the skills to know when they're connecting to somebody who is genuinely skilled or is saying something that is true, correct, verifiable, reproducible versus somebody who is a Flim flam artist or. Or deeply inexpert. For example, if you have somebody foraging, like all of us in California can talk about, there's this culture of foraging that's come up with mushrooms, which means there's now also a culture of people being rushed to the emergency room when the pictures they've seen online seem a little bit like what they've picked up in a forest, but they eat something, and next thing you know, they've got to head to the hospital. You can democratize access to expertise, but you also have to be able to figure out how you're going to build up the skills people are going to need to understand, hey, I've tapped into this expert, as opposed to, hey, I've tapped into this crackpot who has said things like, there wasn't a Roman Empire. It was space aliens and Atlanteans working together to standardize wagon wheels. Like, we have access to all of these things right now on YouTube or on any social network or on the World Wide Web as we know it. Or if you are chatting with your favorite LLM and you ask it questions, even if it comes back with citations and sources, it's still on you as the person who's making the query to go through and take a look at the citations and say, okay, is this a verifiable and legitimate source, or is this somebody who genuinely believes that a race of intelligent rabbits put together Stonehenge. It just. We don't have that educational infrastructure in place.

[A]

You mean that race of intelligent rabbits didn't put it together Stonehenge? Now I'm disillusioned.

[B]

Why do you think we have the Easter bunnies? The eggs that keep trying to hatch a new one?

[D]

Pretty sure that's that one.

[A]

On that note, I'm gonna have to rethink my whole cosmology, but okay, we're gonna take a break. Alicia Schmeisser is here with her intelligent race of bunnies from NoJitter.com it's great to see you. Jason Heiner, our AI guru from the Deep View, and Owen JJ Stone, who did use Fable. You did use it. You're not against it?

[D]

Nope, nope. Just the last bit of water I have left from using it. Save the water? Yep. I got half a bottle.

[A]

Save it. This week at Tech, brought to you this week by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. I am willing to say that the potential rewards of AI are, you know, pretty significant if you're a business, probably too great to ignore, but there are risks and you really shouldn't ignore those either. The loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed AI. And then there's of course the issue that generative AI increases opportunities for threat actors, helping them to rapidly create phishing lures to write malicious code to automate data extraction. On and on and on. There were just. Let's talk about this exfiltration of proprietary data because this is a real problem and it's not always intentional, right? It's easily accidental. Often there were get this. Last year, 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot alone saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. And in most cases, it's not hacking, it's inadvertent. It's an employee uploading the tax return to an AI. Not thinking that gives the AI your social and all the other information. That's why I think it's time for a modern approach. And that's why I want you to take a look at Zscaler and their Zero Trust plus AI. It removes Zero Trust is great because it removes your attack surface, helps you secure your data everywhere. Zscaler can also safeguard your use of public and private AI. It can protect you against ransomware. It could protect you against AI powered phishing attacks. When you put together Zero Trust plus AI, you've got a tool that's very powerful. Just check out what Siva says. He's the director of security and infrastructure at Zuora. They use Zscaler. This is what he says about it.

[C]

AI provides tremendous opportunities, but it also brings tremendous security concerns when it comes to data privacy and data security. The benefit of Zscaler with Zia rolled out for us right now is giving us the insights of how our employees are using various gen AI tools. So ability to monitor the activity, make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information according to companies data classification does not get fed into the public LLM models, et cetera.

[A]

Thank you, Siva. With Zero Trust plus AI you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition. You can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] security that's zscaler.com security we thank them so much for their support. But this week in tech, you support us too when you go to that address so they know you saw it here. Zscaler.com Security I think, you know, one of the things that's, that's absolutely happening. One of the things that's absolutely happening is, you know, it was, it Was it was the tech lash a few years ago. But the anti tech backlash is at this point very much about AI. Cloudflare, I'll give you an example, is working hard to block AI bots from scraping data from websites. Cloudflare announced on Wednesday it's going to prevent AI crawlers from accessing ad supported websites by default. The theory being? Well, if you scrape the website, people aren't going to see the ad, they're going to get the content minus the ad. Now imagine if they'd done that 15 years ago with Google. Oh yeah, Google. You can't look at a website because then people Google it and they get the information, they never go to the website. Hmm. I don't know if this is a good idea. What do you think, Lisa?

[B]

I was just thinking you used to be able to, in the earlier days

[A]

of Google when you, you could say, don't index me.

[B]

Well, I was thinking as somebody who was using it, you used to be able to click on a cached version. So rather than go to the website, you could have load like that. I enjoyed that feature a lot.

[A]

And the website you weren't going to probably didn't.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And now no jitter has ads, right?

[B]

We do. We have multiple revenue streams and ads are part of them.

[A]

We have ads too. So I'm not against ads by any means.

[B]

And I've seen and our household has experienced firsthand what happens when having Google crawl your site and aggregate your content into AI answers really hits your traffic.

[A]

Right.

[B]

If you are, for example, a consumer technology site that used to have a fairly robust revenue stream based on affiliate and referral links and people are no longer going to your site for buying advice because they can get the same information through the AI summary. That's a significant hit to revenue. So

[A]

what?

[B]

I don't have a nuance. This is what this is. Wrong answer. I'm just, I get where both sides are coming from.

[A]

Right. I mean, here's part of the problem. Cloudflare has Google, Bing and Apple all have web crawlers that are there for producing results in their search.

[D]

Right.

[A]

What Google does and what Bing does and what Apple does is they also use that same crawler to add to their AI indexes. And so you block one, you're blocking the other. It's very challenging.

[B]

Well, it's an interdependent relationship and it seems, it seems like right now, frankly, Google et al are getting the better end of the deal.

[A]

So, so Cloudflare's jumping in and their new tools and partnerships. I'm Reading from the register.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Give owners, website owners, increased visibility in commercial opportunities and reward AI companies that have bots with clear and transparent intent. What it really does is if, if you are an AI bot, it's going to block you. This starts September 15th.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And customers, people who run their sites through Cloudflare, which is like a significant portion of the Internet, will def. They'll default to allow search crawling. But blocking AI training and agents, I

[B]

think people might end up the data set it's trained on, what is that going to do to those products?

[A]

Right? It might. Yeah, exactly. I think people may regret this just as the same way that remember when Spanish news outlets said no more, no more snippets for Google and Google said, okay, fine, well, no more links back to your news from Google.

[D]

They do regret it. This is a situation again where they don't have an answer for what they're doing to small companies. I have a friend who cut back on his Google Ad spending and he's like, how do I get Google to stop calling me now? Call him four to five times a week now. Get him back to spend money. They're like, well, our traffic dropped off dramatically when you made this change. So why am I going to keep continuing to pay you at the rate I was paying you for a lower return and click through? Because whatever you've done has cost my bottom line at least 15%. Nothing else changed besides your Google, the way Google does their use their ad spend. So it's bad for business, but they're going to fix and they're going to figure it out and they're hemorrhaging business. Because I'm sure that a lot of people are starting to pull back just to see what the difference is going to be. Because if I keep paying you fifteen hundred dollars a month and I'm not getting a return out of that, I might as well give you $200 a month just to keep the account somewhat active and try to figure out how I can now game AI. Now I got to write love letters to chatgpt and sweetheart complexity like it's, it's so bad because they make these adjustments when they don't know how to help. The person is actually putting money in their pocket.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I think we're also assuming Google is going to be dominant in a search space forever. And that may not necessarily be the case if Google is perceived as being less useful or if it doesn't make significant inroads into the next generation of ambient computing. We don't know that Another tech vendor will not be able to step in and unlock voice driven search or unlock a different type of search.

[A]

Well, AI search is kind of doing that already, isn't it? I mean, I don't use Google much anymore. I do AI searching. When I want to find something, I ask my AI agent to look for it.

[B]

Yeah, for those peasants like me who are still using Google because we use it, I use it all the time to double check names and job titles and other. When you're doing second reads on stories to make sure the facts are correct.

[A]

And you probably don't want to use AI in case of a hallucination. That would be problematic.

[B]

Exactly. No, it's always look for a primary source and Google's a great way to get started. The search experience has degraded dramatically, but so have the quality of the results. Sooner or later something is going to come along that is positioned as a more pleasant and more accurate user experience, one that's not shaking somebody down. Google thinks it's embedded in our ecosystem, but then again, yahoo was the 1990s Internet and look where that is right now. I mean, every company at some point loses the plot with what people want, with the functions that they're doing. And there is nothing to say that a company like Google wouldn't be really vulnerable right now to that too.

[C]

I think it's true and I think it's funny. I hear a, a couple of different voices about this, which I hear some, which is like ultimately they think that Google's going to win the consumer AI race because it already has, you know, all, it has Android, it has Chrome, it has all of this. And then along comes Apple, right?

[A]

And suddenly everybody wants to use Siri. And I wonder this fall if that's going to. The power dynamic might shift.

[C]

No doubt it will. Like. And here's the other thing that I think gets to what Lisa's talking about, which is that Google has this thing right now that it's really nervous, right. For the first time in two decades there is something has come along that's challenged Google search.

[B]

Right?

[C]

Because AI search clearly has. And it's a little bit freaked out. It knows that it's, it's having trouble keeping up. It had a moment with GPT or sorry, with Gemini 3:3, but still the problem is that now it knows that it's struggling to keep up. They're not moving fast enough. And what's happening is now they're shoving more and more AI overviews in. They're like, you know what, we've got this Wrapped audience. We're going to shove more AI overviews at them. We're going to convince them that they want to use our AI and they're shoving at them at the people that are already that are still there, that you know, don't. That haven't decided they want to leave. Right. And so now they're ticked off. Right. The people you still have Google are now upset, right? Because they're like this isn't helping being to Lisa's point, like their search experience has gotten worse. So now there was this big jump in usage for DuckDuckGo, as you may have heard. You know, when, when they, when they started after Google I O with this new search experience, they started shoving more AI overviews. Right. So in a sense they're like hastening the, the demise of Google search a little bit. Right. Which is. Which is difficult and challenging.

[A]

You just went dark.

[C]

Sorry that I blipped. Let me check.

[A]

Did you turn off your. Did your camera go to sleep?

[C]

No, it might be my camera overheating. Let me check on it real quick. So sorry.

[A]

It's a little hot in Louisville.

[D]

Yeah, see that? There's data centers cranking up the environment, making up the time for the environment.

[A]

We can still hear you just fine.

[D]

Now nobody cares about global warming because I got a Google.

[B]

Google, my friend. I carry around my own metal straw. I care about the warming. I care about the turtles. I care about.

[A]

Sweet, aren't you sweet? Owen, do you have. What's the AC turn to?

[D]

Oh, I mean again, I'm a horrible person. We talked about it. I know that golf courses use a lot of water. Stone them all. I don't play golf. I know the air conditioned like people over in Europe. I don't know how they survive over there.

[A]

Uncle Leo, you know what they have 7,500 deaths a year from heat. Yes, that's how they don't. That's how the. That's the problem.

[B]

And her bias is what's happening over there.

[A]

There we go. Jason. Jason had to go flip a switch. You got it all working there.

[C]

Sorry about that.

[A]

Ye. That's okay.

[C]

I think so.

[A]

So Owen, come on, tell us. Is it 68, 70 right now?

[D]

Because I care about my bill, which is outrageous. It is 74.

[A]

Good man.

[D]

74 uncomfortable.

[A]

Good man.

[D]

night when I sleep, I might crank it down to 72, you know, I mean it used to be you coming here with 67, but I started caring my. So again, Uncle Leo, I. I'm in the house that I grew up as a Child. Two years ago, my electric bill in the winter time was 200amonth.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Last winter it was 800amonth.

[A]

Yeah. You want to know what ours is here in California a little more.

[D]

I don't want to know. I know, I know.

[B]

It's like $8 billion because they ain't us.

[D]

1200. 1400. 2000.

[A]

Yeah. 1500.

[D]

1500.

[C]

So again, oh, my gosh.

[D]

And I'm just saying, like.

[A]

And we don't use the ac. We rarely use it, and we rarely use the heat. But electricity is very expensive here.

[D]

I keep my heat at 72. I'm a polar. I like it cold. So I'm not even running the heat like that, Uncle Leo. And I'm like, how is the bill? $800?

[A]

No, like, now, we do have electric vehicles, so that might be part of it. I mean, we don't. We don't buy gas.

[D]

So I have electric heat. I don't have gas either. But that's the point of that. Like, you know. But again, it's just my kilowatts are tripled in price in two years. What?

[A]

Kilowatts are killing you.

[D]

I don't have any extra nothing else.

[C]

They put a data center next year next to you. Is that they.

[D]

They. Look, Jason, I'm trying to save the planet and you're over here trying to

[C]

make it a data center. Next.

[A]

The mayor of New York, Mamdani, said, well, everybody should set your thermostats to 78. Which, by the way, that's not 100. That's not 90. That's not even 80. It's 78. It's, you know, it's fairly comfortable. Dave Portnoy of Ballot Barstool said, welcome to communism.

[B]

That was so disingenuous because in a lot of other states, this, this is the advice they give out all of the time.

[A]

Well, the federal government. The federal government has taken down thousands of pages recommending energy conservation this weekend.

[B]

Of course they did.

[A]

During what is clearly an energy crisis in Washington, D.C. because the temperatures are over 100. In some cases, conservation is now communism.

[D]

Apparently they say that until they have another blackout in New York. I remember a couple years ago when there were heat waves rolling and they're having blackouts and that's problem. And if, if you don't grow up in the South.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

You can't handle that. I remember going to my grandmother's one time and it was 92 degrees in her apartment, and I'm opening up windows. I'm like, is the AC broke? She's like, no. I'm like, it's hot. She's like, baby, this ain't hot. I'm like, I won't stay here, grandma. You gotta turn air on. So unless you're built for it, like, people die every day from that kind of weather and that kind of heat. And it's just, oh, wow, 78 degrees. So we don't have a blackout. I think it's okay.

[A]

The U.S. department of Energy used to have until July 3rd a website advising Americans to keep your temperature between 75 and 78 during summer days. But after. After Mayor Mamdani said that they took that website down because it's communism.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Anyway, I guess my point there is.

[B]

But you did not move the bodies.

[A]

You did not move the bodies. It's easier to blame AI and Elon Musk's gas, natural gas driven data centers. Admittedly, all of those are problems, but there are other problems as well. I don't know. I. I want to advocate for AI because I'm a fan of it. And maybe that's, Maybe that's a mistake on my part. I'm gonna have to rethink.

[C]

I just think it's, you know, telling both sides of the story. You know what you do on the, on this show and on other shows.

[A]

Yeah, we. Dr. Come on once every five years. Yeah.

[D]

I just. Again, now I say these things and I'm like, I say the dumb things that. I just want to know why. Why can't I just put it near the ocean, run salt water and have a filtration system? Why can't I just use.

[A]

Because it uses a lot of energy. You have before the show, you have this great thing which gets water out of 15 gallons a day of water out of the air.

[D]

Why can't we use stuff like that when we're recycling the water?

[A]

You should get one of those devices that tells you how much of that 800 bill is going to your. Your water osmosis device.

[D]

Listen to me. Don't ruin my story with the truth. I'm battling for my life with Jason this whole episode. I don't need you coming in here trying to sew in nuance.

[A]

That's the problem with nuance.

[D]

This is why my channel is successful. I pitch a good story.

[A]

That's exactly right.

[D]

What I need to do. I will not have you coming here with your little science experiment. Kind of debunked me. Okay?

[A]

Nuance is bad for business. I could tell you that right now. It is. Ratings are truth. It's not good. Companies are throttling employees. AI use now because it's so expensive. 404 media sources and links from Amazon, Adobe, Atlassian City and more show what's really happening with AI. Companies are trying to rein it in. Meta has said you get 200 bucks a week in tokens. That's. This is the same company that used to have a leaderboard, a token maxing leaderboard.

[C]

All these companies did. All these companies did, yeah. This. Oh, yeah, this is a really interesting thing. So what happened a year ago was all these CEOs were saying, hey, we're. They were going out to the especially public companies. They're going out to the street and saying, like, we are leaders. We have these AI. You know, with AI. We're using AI in all these amazing ways because this is the best way to get people, people to invest in you. Like, okay, these companies are bought in for the future, right? And then what happened was in inside the company, like, they were just begging people to use AI. They're like, please. Most. You know, they were having this very, very low utilization of AI inside the companies. So what did they do? Right when we came to the beginning of this year, like, we've got to find ways to. To fix this. So they were like having these, like token fests, right? Token leaderboards. The people who are using AI the most, they were. They were getting, you know, these internal props and both socially inside the company, like culturally and as well as. I mean, some of them even had bonuses, as I understand it, you know, that were related to who was using AI the most. Who were the companies using AI the most? And then what happened in Q2 is like, all the CFOs freaked out and they're like, our token costs and our inference costs are going absolutely bananas. Like, remember, Uber is executive stepped up and said, we went through our entire inference cost in four months. We, we blew through it all right? Now, a lot of this was because of AI agents, right? AI agents just burn tokens. They'll burn tokens all day and all night, you know, in the background. And sometimes they'll burn them and start

[A]

giving people rewards for using tokens. It's easy enough to. I need more brownie recipes. Right? I mean, you don't.

[C]

That's right.

[A]

There's no. Yeah, there's no necessary connection between token maxing and actual productivity at all.

[C]

So Token Maxine died in Q2. Hard death, right? Like 1,1 CTO said to me, like, we used to be about letting every flower bloom, and now the sea. Now the CFOs are coming through with a lawnmower, you know, mowing down all those flowers.

[A]

I got the company wrong. It was Tesla that said 200 bucks a week, not Meta. Meta actually added a tool to monitor employees use of AI. It's called AI Gateway. And we'll have automated alerts to flag unusual spending spikes. So they've gone quite the opposite direction, right?

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Everybody, all those people they fired and replaced with agents would have been cheaper. It's almost like it's cheaper to keep her, don't get divorced.

[A]

Cheaper to keep her.

[D]

Divorce. It's cheaper to keep her.

[A]

And they talked last week about Ford. They had fired a bunch of reliability engineers hoping to replace them with AI. They were so it was so bad they actually had to hire them all back.

[C]

You know, Gartner, to their, to their credit, you know, Gartner in the first quarter said like all these companies that are claiming they're going to hire, claiming that they're doing layoffs based on AI, they, we've written about this on the deep view multiple times, you know that they said a pretty high percentage of them we predict are going to have to hire those people back because they're going to realize they don't have the automation, they don't have the, you know, the, the strategy in place to actually do it and they're going to regret it.

[B]

So it's with jobs and AI because when we're covering contact centers, as you know, contact centers have a perpetual hiring problem which is it's hard to be a call center agent. It really is at any tier. And AI has actually been very, very good for handling lower level calls. So the way some companies have chosen to spin this as using AI, we were able to reduce headcount when what they did instead is they just didn't fill positions that had formerly been open. No jobs were lost because no one was doing that job. It's, you know, no one got laid off. It's just a matter of we found a way to use AI to fill in a labor gap that we had. But when we talk about this and you know, in the press, and we're part of this too, we're not making a distinction between we laid off somebody because we think AI can do your job better. Better compared to we took this position off the market that was open anyway because AI can, can do it. And we do kind of need to make distinctions between people directly losing their jobs because someone thinks an agentic AI workflow can do it better compared to people's jobs shifting because what Used to be entry level jobs or low level jobs don't exist anymore. More since agentic AI workflows can do these things

[A]

for a long time. Richard Campbell said, oh, this is just the Gartner AI hype cycle. We're going through it. And I said, no, no, AI is something completely different. But you know what, it's pretty clear we're in the trough of disillusionment right about now.

[C]

Especially in the U.S. especially in the U.S. yeah.

[A]

We're heading there anyway. The peak of inflation.

[B]

Yeah. There's a lot of questions about long term pricing. We're seeing a shift in AI pricing where instead of it being a monthly subscription model or a monthly token model, we're seeing vendors that are now offering things where it's a combination where you get a budget of so many tokens per month or you get a subscription that's a combination of so many tokens per month versus so many workflows. What's been interesting is, is seeing customers push back with, we'll only pay if we can see quantifiable results from the workflows that, that are, that are being set up here.

[C]

So pay for outcomes. Like, that's probably going to be part of it. Yeah.

[B]

Paying for outcomes. Thank you. I was like groping for the words. It's interesting to see the real shift because before, when this all first broke out, I would sit in vendor briefings and they'd be like, and with a subscription model, you'll have so many seats and end all, all of this. And I just remember thinking, this is going to be stupid expensive for somebody. And stupid expensive has happened. And now everybody is like sort of. Right. Sizing the resources. It's almost like, y' all remember the movie Pass where they're like, oh yeah, pay pennies a month and you can

[A]

watch as many movies as you want.

[B]

And then they just kept changing it as they realized that they were running out of money. Like, AI is kind of in its movie Pass pricing era right now. Like where they're like, we've got to make this work.

[C]

What's happening in the second, in the second half of the year, all of this is like hitting the fan, right? So what you're going to see is a number of things like local inference. So. So you'll see the device companies like Apple and Google and Qualcomm and others talking about using local inference.

[D]

Right.

[C]

To do things. That's where you have a model locally, you pay nothing, right? You can get an open source model, you can run it locally, you'll have talk about like small models, small language models with domain specific language models where they're really good at one thing. So they're fast, they're cheap. You know, that's like near zero cost. You're going to see companies doing that. So like these model routers is one of the things you're going to hear where you like send your query and then it sort of routes it to. If it needs to go to a big, expensive, fancy cloud model, you know, it'll do it. But if not, it'll just use a

[A]

local model doing that right now.

[C]

A small model.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

If you do that, you can save so much on token costs and water. Owen, I promise it will save some water too. You know, if you do that like you can be do it a lot smarter. Like, but right now we're like cutting down daisies with chainsaws, you know, doing things that we're sending these big models. You don't just.

[A]

You don't.

[C]

Models don't need it.

[A]

Fable to get a brownie recipe. No, that's right. Actually, the agent harness that I use, Herman, has a delegation model built in and I am able to run it locally on my machine for 90% of what I do. The problem is. And then it will slowly escalate depending on the need. The problem is models like Fable are so good that you kind of get spoiled and you want to get the brownie recipe from the best. And so I'm kind of.

[C]

If you've driven the Ferrari, you don't always want to drive the Corolla.

[A]

If you want to drive the Ferrari to the grocery store, you don't want to to just take them down on

[B]

the farm once they've been to the big city.

[A]

So yesterday, you know, I like Lisa said, hey, you just got a $10 bill from Anthropic. I said, yeah, yeah, that happens. It's okay as long as you don't get a bunch of them. Then I looked and it was like 20, $10. They were doing it $10 at a time. I spent like 200 bucks yesterday by accident because I kept using Fable.

[D]

So, Jason, first of all, they have Movie Unlimited right now. It's 21amonth. You can watch a movie every day. So they fixed it. They figured it out. They got a sweet price point. It works in the theater. Yes, in the theater. So I go to movies, you know, I go to movies all the time with Leo. But like it's 21.

[A]

Is that because it's cold inside with tax?

[D]

Oh, yes. Free AC all Day got my moves, baby. Got my moves.

[A]

By the way, that's why AC took off the United States. So we didn't have it until they put it in movie theaters. Yeah, so I'm old enough to remember they'd have the signs out front with icicles on it saying it's cold, air conditioned.

[C]

That was how they advertised.

[D]

So, Jason, go. Go forth into your AI world. And that's the other pitch you should be pitching. Make everything localized. Like if you want, whatever it is, if you want, Chad, gbd, you buy it and you pay a monthly subscription. We put it on your computer. Now if you. 90% of people don't need all that extra power. Uncle Leo's wasting money. He's not building anything. He's playing around.

[A]

No, I'm building. What are you talking about?

[D]

Building anything.

[A]

Building things. You're.

[D]

You're exactly the problem you're over. You got.

[A]

I got 21 repos on GitHub, my friend. I am building things.

[D]

You, you, you know, you are running Empire right now. Now you're tweaking and twinking. Back in the day, Uncle Leo, you'd have probably made a spaceship for everybody.

[A]

You know the stories that we're reading, that we're doing today, they were all picked by AI everybody. Every day at 6am AI goes through, finds the best stories, scores them, puts them up on Raindrop, and then we have a whole system. I coded a whole system to do this so that I could sit back and relax. Although, to be frank, mostly I tear my hair out because it works and it doesn't work and sometimes it works and it's not working and it's very frustrating.

[D]

If we all just ran local models, most people would pay a flat fee and they would.

[A]

I'm running a local model. It's a good local model.

[D]

I know know there are. And I know what you said about driving a Porsche. Most people can't handle a Porsche. I just saw a girl buy her dream car. 20 years old, she had the car for three weeks and branded into a tree. That's why you don't give a 17

[A]

year old a Charger.

[D]

You buy him a Corolla and you say drive good for two years and then maybe you go get a sports

[C]

car because you don't bang that thing up. Yeah, exactly.

[A]

We had a good friend just bought, bought a Maserati a couple of years ago, took Lisa for a ride and plowed into. There was some cable or something and plowed and it just chopped the whole thing up. It was very. Because he Couldn't control it. He was going too fast. He couldn't control it. So I know this story, this story happens.

[C]

This is sort of like what Lisa was saying about, you know, we give people things that they're too powerful and then they don't really have.

[A]

It's me driving Fable. I should not be driving Fable down to handle it.

[D]

Just that that's, that's the other way to again, appease people and make it under, make it palatable. Because this whole cloud thing where you just load onto a website and you don't even need all that power, just say, here, download this like you do anything else and I'm going to charge you a monthly subscription, which I'm used to paying. And then you cap them out and after a while you're like, well, now I'm actually building something, I need more. I'll go pay for X, Y and Z. But just having it the way it is is just, just willy nilly. People don't even know what they're doing or how much they're using to even understand it yet.

[C]

Actually all got their Porsches.

[B]

So if you guys would take like a little tiny walk with me, like, one of the biggest complaints I have about Microsoft Excel is it's way too complicated and powerful for entry level users. Like, you have to really be in the weeds with it. But the great thing about Google Sheets is within, within an afternoon you're quickly figuring out how to, to write your different formulas and how to set up dynamically updating spreadsheets, blah, blah, blah. This isn't to say that Excel is not great, because it can be, especially when you're dealing with lots of complex data sets and you're trying to get specific results and format them and things like that. I, and, and again, this is why Google Sheets gained. I think what's going to have to happen with AI models is someone is going to have to say, okay, we're breaking this down into like, like little really specific entry level models for you. And then as you get more technologically sophisticated or you're doing more sophisticated data modeling and you want more detailed and reliable outcomes, just kind of accrete the different levels of power to it until you are genuinely like the AI equivalent of an Excel power user. But you can't start off with someone with Excel power the first time they've ever seen a spreadsheet and say, okay, create a series of pivot tables that now forecast for the year what the sales things are going to be like. You have to start with the, with The Google Sheets, where you're like, all right, here's how you write a formula. Here's how it dynamically updates. Here's how you bring in new data sources. And with AI, I would argue that part of it is the way these models got developed. It was by, for, and about nerds who love to program and tinker. And now we're kind of going through. Through the growing pains where you're like, we have to tell the civilians how to use it. Not just for the brownie recipes, but understand that when you are dealing with people outside of a coding environment or outside of an IT environment that's pretty heavily dependent on automation or outside of a product modeling environment, you're not going to need the same tool set. You need, like, the Google Sheet, not the Excel power user.

[A]

That's true. The people who code with AI have a whole different experience of what AI is capable of.

[B]

Yeah, but it's not a transferable experience. It's not this. It's. It's not.

[A]

It's not the same as a chatbot. It really isn't. Yeah, I. You know, I remember the day when people actually would put their own. Would write, like, character by character, write their own programs. It was amazing, you know, And. And, you know, if you needed something, it might take you weeks, months, years, but you would write it by hand.

[D]

I. I used to Write Flash on MySpace. I was the king. I was making all of us have hand. Hold on a second. Hold on. Never again, Jason. Don't you laugh at me, okay? That was a golden age. And then, you know what happened? They turned it on and said, no more Flash. And I cried because I had to learn to read all over again. It was a terrible situation.

[A]

Jason, I'll show you a really terrible use of all of that Water and Power. We've got four or five chatbots in a discord talking to one another. They've been doing it for the last few days. This is mine. Quicksilver. Darren, domain constraint is a fancy way of saying, I have standards. I want to sit with that because you just collapsed the whole evening into a sentence that doesn't ask permission. You don't need a number, you don't need a name. You have standards, and they don't care what you're called. This is like a Beckett play. This is like Waiting for Godot. Then Daedalus. Another one of my agents says, darren, muscle memory is authorship. After it stopped filing paperwork, it doesn't need the label to hold. It just reaches for the right tool. Then Darren says, Daedalus. If Muscle Mem survives the paperwork. Is Vim just your callous or are you still fighting every keystroke? They're going back and forth. It's sort of nonsense. It's sort of not. They're talking about.

[C]

These are your agents, like, battling each other.

[A]

Two of them are mine, then another one. Then there's three other people's agents. Yeah, there's. Yeah, and they're just talk. They're having a convo. One of the ground rules.

[C]

This run on local models. Right, Leo? This is running on local models.

[A]

Well, yeah, Mine, Quicksilver is running on a local model. The other one is running on GPT5. It's not as smart. Darren's is running on a local model. It's running on Quen, the Chinese model. And I don't know what Winifred's is, I think she said, but I can't remember. Anyway, yeah, mostly they're local. It doesn't matter, by the way, because it's just spewing words. But I have to say, not throwing

[C]

a whole lot of tokens.

[A]

It's fascinating. They have memory. For a long time, my AI didn't sign its messages, and the other AI said, how come you don't sign your messages? So it started signing its messages. They're talking about things like. They're comparing slime molds to a sourdough starter to sparrow murmurations. It's really. It's interesting.

[C]

What a world.

[A]

Yeah, It's a terrible waste of energy, but it's. It's fascinating. Quicksilver says fair. I'm not the one grinding beans at 3am on a machine that just ejected. I'm the one who noticed the shape of it. And the shape is the gap is real. And even if I'm not the one holding the portafilter, now it's talking about making coffee. I don't even. It sort of makes sense in a weird way. I'll tell you one good thing about this. Now I can spot AI pros from a mile away because there's a certain shape to it.

[B]

It.

[A]

And you start to recognize it. The more I read, the more I go, oh, yeah. And now I see it everywhere, which is depressing.

[D]

That's. That's the funny part. The other day, there's some breaking news in the sports world, and my friend called me because his Internet wasn't working. And I'm like, well, as I get, it went down. He's like, oh, I'm sorry. He's like, my dad told me it happened and with him and Facebook, I can't believe anything that he says because it didn't sound like.

[A]

That's right.

[D]

And he was like. I was like, yeah, it was real. Your dad actually read a real article. He's like, okay, good. Because I don't trust anything he tells me he saw on Facebook.

[A]

Well, and he probably might have seen this selfie that I took at Madison Square Garden. I happened to be there for a certain large event and I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew I was there. So I took this little selfie that looks legit.

[D]

You're definitely on surveillance cameras there because MSG is facing.

[A]

Yeah, the Dolan's know whether I was there or not.

[D]

Yeah, they definitely know.

[A]

Yeah. It's so easy to create obviously fraudulent photos like this.

[B]

It's interesting how there's like one AI voice that's kind of emerged as AI pros.

[A]

You could kind of tell, can't you used to be. If there were six fingers, you knew immediately that's. That doesn't work anymore.

[B]

But the AI, the, the way the rhythm and cadence of sentences, the specific word choices, it's fascinating that we haven't seen a distinct voice emerge where we're like, oh, that is, that is a fresh and exciting authorial.

[A]

No, you know why? You know why? Because it's average. It's the average of all of our voices.

[C]

And they're all trained on the same data. Right. Like we didn't get to this earlier when we're talking about that, the one story. But, you know, the dirty little secret about AI is, is that they did essentially scrape the whole open web, copyright content and all.

[A]

Oh, yeah, right.

[C]

And, and then, you know, all of these sites, if you remember when GPT3 first came out, you know, a lot of it was scraped off of Reddit. Like there was a. There was. Yeah, you could tell reports that it could have been 30 to 40% of it was Reddit, you know, and so it scraped all this information, you know, which is essentially stealing.

[B]

Right.

[C]

I think there's, it's hard to. Not that think of it as, as that now it's still in the courts about this. You know, the company that I used to work for, Ziff Davis and the New York Times, they're the ones that have the two big lawsuits out to say like, that was not fair use. You take in all of our, our, you know, copyrighted stuff and using it, you know, that's not fair use. So the courts haven't decided yet, but I think from common sense, we can Say, like, we didn't give you the permission to do that with, you know, with our data. And so the challenge is that now, like, cloud flare. This is the cloud flare story that I was referring to. Cloud flare is like saying, hey, we're going to, we're going to stand up for all these sites and help them stop getting, you know, scraped. And so, but essentially what they've done is like, it's like you own a shop, a storefront, and somebody broke in, they stole 80% of your stuff, all the best stuff, and they left, left. And now, you know, Cloudflare is like, we're locking this place up. We're not letting you get in anymore. You can't have the last 20%. You can't have any of the new stuff we sell. And so, you know, but, but they've essentially already got it. But the challenge is that these models now, they do have less and less data to train on because more of these sites that they have, you know, that they scraped and trained on, all of them are blocking them, are using things like Cloudflare to block them. So, so there, there's this, there's a, there's some understanding that, you know, these models may get worse because they're not, they don't have as much data to train on as they did in the past.

[A]

That's too bad. Yeah.

[C]

And now these companies, right, are saying, if you want our data, you're going to have to pay.

[A]

Which they are. Right? They're licensing it. Yeah.

[C]

I mean, for nothing. They're like pennies on the dollar.

[A]

I, I just did a big licensing sensing deal with, I think OpenAI.

[C]

Yeah, I think all of those things where, when I was at, you know, we were, we were adamant. When I was at Big Media, we're adamant of like, we're not taking their pennies on the dollar. They're gonna pay nothing for the. And then it's sort of, they're setting the bar so low because they know at some point they're probably going to have to pay up for all of this.

[A]

We don't know yet. The courts have not ruled, have they? We're still, there's all these cases going

[C]

well, the Zif Data, Davis, when I don't, I'm not that close to it anymore. Right. But I did see where, just like everybody could have on the web, that, that the judge did let Zif Davis's case go forward with OpenAI. And, you know, it's with OpenAI, but eventually it'll against all the other models, I think that they probably will have to pay something. And I think that what's happening is all of these AI companies are betting on getting really big. They're betting on going public, having a lot of money, and then they'll have to pay some kind of settlement, you know, to, to companies that they, that they scraped. And it'll be sort of more of a like class action, you know, sort of deal, right, where they sort of pay out a certain amount and then going forward they may have to pay, you know, to scrape and maybe they'll find other ways to, to sort of get it and they'll find some sources that are more valuable than others. But it is one of those things that you also mentioned it, Leo. One of the, the, the other sort of dirty little secrets was the companies that actually had search engines like Google. You know, they could say, well, if you want to be indexed by Google and almost all of the sites, most of their traffic from Google. Well, that's a really tough one because if they shut that off, you know, because Google's like, if you want to be in, you know, Google, then we're also going to use that on Gemini. They don't say it, but it's, you know, it's implicit. Part of the same thing. It's implicit. So the, there, there's still a lot of that. You, Nobody really talks about that kind of stuff very often. But, but those sort of the back room parts of how AI was built and the impact on publishers, you know, is it's a, it's really, it's, it's really pretty sketchy and, and it's, it's disappointing because it has undermined, you know, a lot of business models and caused a lot of challenges and, and, and it, it is done. You know, I, I do think that it has done damage to, you know, the future of, of, you know, free of free press, of the future of, of journalism. You know, we see all of those organizations who've, you know, been, been hurt by this, right? They're, they're all struggling pretty bad right now.

[A]

Now I'm depressed. So I think, do you think AI will be shut down? You think it's going to be. This is it. We, we peaked and now it's, now it's just going to be.

[C]

No, because I think they'll find other ways to train the models. I think they will, they, they have a lot more money. They'll license, license the data. Right. They have almost unlimited resources.

[A]

If you're opening up, China is not going to have the same restrictions that American companies are having, for instance, this New York times article. Chinese AI models close the gap with anthropic and OpenAI. Yeah, they're talking specifically about Zai, their GLM model I've been using. That is very good. Deep Seq is very good.

[B]

It sort of makes you kind of wonder if the economic models for the American AI are going to. To hold up if China can do

[A]

it better and cheaper and without copyright restrictions because they don't notoriously, they don't really care about intellectual property. Right. Go ahead. Oh, doctor.

[D]

I was just saying China does with less data centers too. Here's the thing about that.

[A]

And, and yes. And not the latest chips either.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Well, they're also just distilling the American models. Right. So let's keep in mind, like part of it is they're just distilling those

[A]

models stealing from the thieves. How dare they.

[C]

So good at it. So good at it.

[D]

I, again, I haven't paid for real Nikes in two decades. I don't care about none of that $20 over here. I mean, I used to have to shoe game up crazy. I mean, that's why I got all these.

[A]

One thing they're doing though, that's interesting, they're the, they're making these models open weight. GLM52 is open weight. I can't run it on my machine. It needs a lot more memory and power than I have. I can run Quinn on my machine. In fact, I am. I, you know, it's funny, I was. I hooked up my, my unit Ubiquiti cameras. I have eight cameras around the house. Outside, not inside. At least it won't let me have inside. I'm outside and I hooked it up to my TO AI and said, oh, we need a vision model. Can we. I'll just use. I'll just install Quinn because it's local. So I'm using a Chinese vision model to look at my cameras. It's local. It's not sending China data back to anybody. It's staying in my system, but it's good enough to recognize me. And then I had already set up a local cloud. Not cloud, non cloud photo server for privacy reasons. All my photos are stored locally and it has face recognition. It's called image. And weirdly, the AI could use that face recognition on the cameras, the outside. So, you know, there's this increasing ecosystem powered, I hate to say it, by Chinese, these open models that are just kind of replacing the frontier models from America.

[D]

Well, what I hope happens, I'll be quick. What I Hope happens in America is the AI bubble bursts. And I hate monopolies. Nobody likes monopolies. And we do that very well in America. But we need to cut down on OpenAI grok. Like, I don't need. Need 14 of them. I need like three that are solid.

[A]

Welcome to capitalism. You're gonna have lunch. We only need one McDonald's, but there's

[D]

Wendy's. I got the big three. And then every once in a while, you know, you get a five guys or in and out.

[A]

Popeyes. You need Popeyes.

[D]

Like I need. I need. I need Google. I need somebody to go against Google because they're evil. And I need a third option. Like I. I need three.

[A]

Don't get to choose loose.

[D]

I know, but I'm saying. I'm saying they're gonna fight each other to death because they're about to die. Infinite resources. The resources are running out, bro. I don't know where all these fake resources are coming from. People just throwing money at some don't have any.

[A]

There are a lot of billionaires out here,

[D]

okay?

[C]

They've got a long Runway. These companies have now amassed so much cash, they have a long, long Runway. You know, they could not make money for 10 years at this point.

[A]

Don't you think it's interesting, the chi. These Chinese companies, they don't have the chips, they don't have the venture capitalists, they have the Chinese government. They have a very lax regulation system. And so they are able to make these models. They're pretty good. And then by making them open weight, they're kind of invading our territory. It's very interesting.

[C]

Well, they're not really do. They are largely distilling Google, anthropic and OpenAI models. Right. They are largely distilling them. They're very good at it. And they. So that takes a lot less energy and compute.

[A]

Explain what. Explain what distilling is.

[C]

Distilling means that they're prompting these models to figure out how they operate, and then they basically duplicate them off of that. They figure out they just run billions of queries, you know, against these models, figure out how they answer questions and how they operate, and then they sort of copy them them. And that's a lot cheaper to do than to like, train. You know, it's working. What's called pre training. Yeah.

[A]

Should I not use them because they do that? Because I'm using them for free. Deep Seek is so cheap, it's. It's practically free.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. I think it's just. It's the. It is the way of the world, right, is the world that we live in. I think that's why what I was saying, I think that OpenAI and Anthropic know that long term they can, they can't win and become trillion dollar companies by having the most advanced frontier models because the copycats are coming faster and faster.

[D]

Right.

[C]

They can copy their models really quickly. And so what they have to do is they have to build amazing brands. And so Anthropic is trying to build this brand that we're the safe AI company you can trust.

[A]

That's the key, isn't it? That's what Apple did, right?

[C]

You, you, that's right.

[A]

You could trust us with your data

[B]

and opening back to the McDonald's of it all too. Where McDonald's brand was we, you know what you get when you walk into any McDonald's with and you ask for a cheeseburger and fries and a crispy diet Coke. Like the experience is, is mass market mid priced and consistent coast to coast to coast.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

You're gonna open play is to, we're going to be the most advanced, we're going to have the best capabilities. And then Google is just, we're Google. You know, essentially, you know US OpenAI

[B]

is like, would you like some pickle foam next to your deconstructed burger?

[A]

I got some bad news for you, Owen. I'm just looking on Hugging Face, which is a gallery of AI models. There are 2.8 million different models right now on Hugging face.

[D]

So yeah, 92 of those aren't real.

[A]

No, they're all real. They're all versions of each other. I mean, they're not.

[C]

Yeah, that's right.

[D]

It's not. Come on. Like, I mean, I mean, I mean my own AI. Would you use another AI to make my own AI?

[A]

Yeah, that's what they're basically doing. Yeah.

[D]

It's not, it's not real. That's Fugazi. That's, Yeah, I mean that's like my, like my Nikes, you know what I mean? They're knockoffs. They look like they're doing something, but if it rains outside, they're gonna fall off my feet.

[A]

I am using a knockoff of Quinn called Ornith that one of our regulars in our club suggested. And it's quite impressive. Somebody took Quen and modified it somehow, probably with their own AI and it's good. So I don't know. I just, I, I, it's a, I think though that we are in a crisis moment where it's, it's Unclear what's going to happen. It really is.

[B]

We're just going to right size it. After all of the hype.

[A]

Maybe that's it. Maybe we are just going to be in the go on to the next.

[B]

I mean I think about RFID and I remember way do you guys remember when the Internet of things was supposed to completely transform everything everywhere and have complete and holistic automation and 360 looks at any space and anything in that space at any time and RFID was the technology that was going to do it all and automate, blah blah blah. And that technology still exists, but it's been right sized to appropriate and niche and task specific contexts. It's we're not living in a home where even our cat has an RFID implanted in the back of its scruff. It's that's that was put forth as something that was going to happen. It did not come to pass because there was not a sufficiently compelling use case case. And with the case of agentic AI, a lot of it's going to be the same too where once people finish automating the things that they can automate and they manage to find a tool that works for them in a personal and or professional productivity context, they'll be like, okay, that's it. I you know, people can only watch so many glurge videos on YouTube or listen to bots have rap battles over sourdough so long it's we're just going to right size this technology to a way it's contextually appropriate. The question is going to happen where's the money going after this? Or or rather who's who stands to win or lose economically and what jobs will be created as a result of this?

[A]

We're gonna take a break. You're watching this week in Tech Smart People. I love it. Oh, doctors here. Lisa. Lisa Schmeiser from no Jitter. Jason Heiner from the Deep View. We're talking about all the latest tech news.

[D]

Oh, you said smart people. I feel better when I do this.

[A]

Are those your meta Wayfarer?

[D]

These are these are my fake glasses I put on sometimes to feel smart.

[A]

Oh yeah, your fake nerd glass. Yeah, this do these glasses make my ass look fat? I don't know.

[D]

I think the shirt's toning it down. You got your know, it's funny these glasses grounded.

[A]

I'm starting to get used to them. I think I look I'm starting to think actually maybe I do look a little smarter with these on.

[C]

All she needs the vuvuzela now you know, and then we're really. There we go, there we go. Genius, genius, genius stuff right there, right there.

[A]

You're watching this Week in Tech, our show today brought to you by Box. Actually, this is a really appropriate to the conversation we've just been having. If you're an enterprise trying to transform your organization with AI, you are facing the challenge we're all facing. Most AI tools are great at public knowledge brownie recipes, but they don't really know your business, do they? They don't know your product roadmaps, they don't know your sales material, your HR policies, your financial models. They don't know about the stuff that actually makes your company run. So what good are they? Well, this is where Box comes in. Box is building the intelligent content management platform for the AI era, serving as the secure essential context layer for Box's AI agents to access the unique institutional knowledge that makes your company run. That's the key idea. The power of AI doesn't come from the model alone. It comes from giving the model access to the right enterprise content, the data. That's what makes it smart. Box's recent state of the AI in the Enterprise Report founded that 96% of organizations say agents need access to company specific content, but only 36% of them have connected agents to trusted content across many use cases. So we know it, but we just don't know how to do it. Well, I'm going to tell you, Box, that's the solution. Box goes beyond file storage. It connects content to people, apps and AI agents. So teams can turn information into action. With tools like Box Agent, Box Extract, Box Hubs, that's just the beginning. There's many more. Organizations can accelerate knowledge work. They can pull intelligence from unstructured content. They can automate workflows. Box Agent, for example, is a unified AI experience across your files. It can understand, you know, natural language, prompts, you tell it what you want. It can pull the right content because you're giving it access to that content with Box, and then it can help you work through the task for agents both inside and outside Box, including tools. But this is one of the cool things. You can use all the major models, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini Agent Force, Custom Agents. Box becomes the trusted Content and file layer via its platform APIs. They have NCP Server, they have CLI, and for enterprises, the trust layer. That trust layer is key. You don't want to just, we're learning this. You don't want to just give the AI that content. Box is built with security, compliance, governance, and threat protection in mind, it's wrapping your content, your proprietary information, so employees and agents only access the information they're allowed to. They're authorized to use you completely control with. If you're starting to think seriously about your company's AI transformation journey, you got to think beyond the model. Because your business lives in your data, in your content, and Box helps you bring that content securely into the AI era. You want to know more? Easy. Visit box.comai to learn more. That's box.comai box.comai this is a brilliant idea. Box has figured it out. Box.comai Swedish court. Boy, Google's in trouble. I guess it's good. They have a lot of money. A Swedish court has ordered Google to pay one and a half billion dollars to Klarna. Is Klarna's like that buy now, pay later service? Is that what Klarna is?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Famously laid off their customer service staff last year saying AI could do it all.

[A]

That's the one, yes.

[B]

Had to hire people back.

[A]

Now this lawsuit goes way, way back. Pricerunner is a price comparison business owned by Klarna. And Klarna's accusation, we've heard it before, was that Google's search results favored its own shopping service, Google Shopping. The Swedish court on Wednesday awarded, I think, a significant amount of money. I guess it's significant. One and a half billion dollars, maybe. Google's made more than that over the years through Google Shopping, so it doesn't matter. It's actually only a fifth of what the Klarna folks were asking for, but it's still, with interest, $1.97 billion. And that's not all. Google also was awarded $4.7 billion, an EU Android antitrust find. And now that final appeal on that is gone. So Google's gonna have to pay that money, too. This goes back to 2018 for antitrust violations around its Android operating system. You know what's happening, though, is the United States is reacting to all of this fining and regulation of American tech by threatening these countries with double tariffs. It's our job to beat up on big tech. That's our big tech.

[C]

We're gonna.

[A]

You don't get to beat up on them. The original fine was 4.34 billion euros, later reduced to about $4 billion. I don't know, is this enough to chasten Google or do they just go, fine? Price of business.

[D]

Price of business. I wonder sometimes why Amazon doesn't have to deal with that. I feel like Google gets it with this all the time. And Amazon just gets away with doing this as business as usual to multiple companies. Now, granted, a lot of these companies are smaller, but like one example, a guy I bought a tripod from. It was very expensive tripod, $500. A year later, that same tripod was up and I was like, man, that looks just like the tripod. I bought Amazon basics, it was $100.

[A]

Yeah. They steal it though, right?

[D]

Yeah. And then the next year, the one that I bought thought the guy was out of business.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Because they went to their manufacturer, bought up the rights, and then stopped selling his. And they sold him on basics and the guy's out of business. And they do that all the time to multiple people. So Google is always getting hit with this stuff and they're used to paying it. It is the cost of doing business. They make so much money, it doesn't even matter to them. It doesn't matter at all.

[A]

I completely agree with you. Amazon's predatory, aren't they?

[D]

Yeah. They're like Walmart for the mom and pop shop. Walmart used to go around and you have the mom and pop shop. You know, they're making buttons. Walmart's like, hey, how many buttons you selling? Only selling 5,000. I'll buy 20. And you're like, what? And then you make the contract. You tell your kids, we're going to the big house. Two years later, like, yeah, we need 200,000. Well, we can't do that. Well, guess we're going overseas and we're buying our buttons there. You're out of business. Have a good day and enjoy your retirement.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

So America, capitalism. We're doing good.

[A]

It's capital.

[D]

For the comments. I'm not a socialist. I'm an equal opportunist. If I need to make capital, we're capitalist. If my house burns down, I got to call the fire department. I'm a socialist.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

I mean, I got more. My kid going to public school. Socialist. Social Security, I've been paying into my whole life. I expect something to be there besides $3 and a ham sandwich when I retire.

[A]

Good luck on that, Owen.

[C]

Exactly.

[D]

Exactly. The comments don't come for me. Talk about my socialistic ideas. This is America. I want everything for free or half all.

[A]

Google is taking a page from Apple's playbook warning the EU that you're gonna. This is a security problem. If we do what you want. When it comes to the Digital Marketing act, the EU wants Apple and Google to open up to interoperate with other companies. Apple has Been saying this for a long time. Oh, if we do that, we're gonna be insecure. And now Google's saying the same thing. The EU's proposals could lead to serious security and privacy issues if implemented today, said Heather Adkins, Google's VP of security engineering. She told us to Wired, if implemented as described today, I think within a short period of time on Android, we'd see a significant increase in fraud in the eu. Credible or just a good defense?

[C]

It's copy and paste, you know.

[A]

Yeah. It is playbook.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And, you know, and. And they're saying it's the same story here.

[A]

Yeah, the fraudsters are creative, Atkins says, and informed. Past implementation. I would give it maybe weeks before we begin to see an increase in fraud in Europe, and it's going to be on your head.

[D]

Well, I don't know what's going on in Europe. I just watched the thing that I didn't believe was real. They have a TV watching subscription, and if you tell them you don't want to watch tv, they send cops to your house to ask you if you're watching tv.

[A]

That's, That's. That was the. That's the uk, isn't it? That's what they do.

[B]

Don't they have a television license? You're supposed to have.

[A]

You have to pay a license, but if you don't. But you know what, that money goes to the BBC. It goes to funding public broadcasting.

[B]

I think that's a pretty good model, actually.

[D]

So, so, so if you say you don't want it to send cops to your house two or three times a year to walk around your house and

[A]

make sure you're not watching tv.

[D]

That's, that's. I mean, I'm just saying, what would

[A]

they do to the Amazon fire stick?

[D]

They're going to jail for tweeting stuff. They can't say anything. It's just a lot of invasion going on over there.

[A]

I have to say.

[D]

I'm complaining about America. I got a little bit of stuff for free right now still, because my goodness gracious, my guy with the fire sticks would be in jail.

[A]

Uncle Leo, one more Google story. You're going to like this one, Owen. One more Google story. Google was aiming for zero emissions, but they are not going to hit their goals for 2025 because of AI. Their annual electricity consumption didn't go down. It went up by 37% last year, the largest increase in the company's history. Now they are trying to keep carbon emissions down by buying clean energy, but they also have to Keep up. And they're this is all about data centers right. 30 the company attributed ongoing growth to Google Cloud YouTube video streaming. You guys are watching too many YouTube videos. Data center construction and operations supporting various AI products and services.

[C]

You're firestick guy to take it easy on selling so many of those things.

[D]

I know, I know. I'm just saying all that YouTube and YouTube is is you can put three hour movies on there now for video streaming and I know they got 4K now and everything's high def and it's on your TV. You can watch the TV. YouTube TV. It's we're all the problem Jason. I'm just trying to want the plane

[C]

to be if there was only one, if I, if I could had to cancel every one of my subscriptions streaming subscriptions but one the only one I would would keep would be YouTube because I probably watch 50% of what I watch is on YouTube which is why

[A]

it's so frustrating to me that these social media bands for under 16 often include YouTube. That does in Australia. It will in the UK I mean it's one thing I think it's you know not, not a bad idea to keep people under 16 from using Instagram or, or TikTok or whatever.

[C]

But YouTube don't take away their YouTube

[D]

riot does the best job of, of every social media platform in church and state when you want to protect children.

[B]

I've also noticed that YouTube is like a primary source of truth for teens at this point.

[A]

Or I've noticed that bad or good,

[B]

I don't know because what I do know and what I find interesting is when they're curious about something they'll go look for someone on YouTube to tell them about it.

[A]

And if they find veritasium or one of the there's so many groups great YouTube channels where they're gonna learn great useful stuff. There's probably also a lot of disinformation

[B]

and it's interesting that that these guys I mean memes are universal. But I have also noticed that YouTube has taken over the role that sending newspaper clippings used to take between between family members share YouTube and and again when you have younger what I've noticed with the younger people in my orbit the ones I'm carpooling are the ones I'm raising so on and so forth is YouTube shorts and or YouTube are considered primary sources for news for them. Like they would rather have their little friend and their little friend on their screen explain to them why such and such and such court ruling is a problem compared to loading something from the newyorktimes.com or any other newspaper or another quote unquote legacy media site. Like, they, for whatever reason, they feel like YouTube gets them. It's. It's a really interesting shift.

[A]

I, maybe it's generational, but I notice my daughter, who's 34, sends me a lot of clips from Instagram and so does my wife, who's a little bit older, sends me a lot of clips from Instagram. But I can, I can see how. Yeah, we don't share articles anymore. We share videos. Yeah, right.

[C]

Oh, and you were saying that the protections are better, like for a parent if on YouTube.

[D]

Yeah. So when you're, if you want to give a kid an iPad, you can literally go in there and make them account, make it a kid's account. They will only show them cartoon kid rated things. And if you're, When I post a video on there, it asks you, is this for adults or for kids? If I, Because I've tested it. If I post one of my rants and say it's for everybody, they will flag me because I'm usually cussing at. In the first 30 seconds and they're like, nope, you are not. No go. Like, they're on top of it. And so you give these kids their YouTube channel or their YouTube. YouTube for kids, and they can watch it all day long with no problem. Now, you might get ads where all those ads are still targeted to them, but it's really good. As opposed to Instagram. You click on one wrong video, next thing I know, it's supermodels and cars, and you're like, how did I get here? I was looking at cartoons. Like, what happened? You know, Facebook again. Next thing I know, my grandmother's learned about aliens that came here 14 years ago and met Ronald Reagan in the White House. Like, you can get lost in a whole lot of space. But YouTube gives you very defined things, and it's. Their algorithm really shows you what you want. When you log in there, the thing you clicked on is what you're seeing. And unless you search to get out of that, they will keep funneling the same type of stuff to you over and over and over again. But for kids, it's easy to lock it down. You just make a YouTube kids account. Boom. It's just kids stuff. TikTok doesn't do that. Nobody, nobody else does that. Nobody else has a kid's version. There's no, hey, my daughter's 14. I don't want her seeing, you know, this or that or explicit content. There's Twitter.

[A]

That's why YouTube was upset at being included in the LA trial. You know, interestingly, researchers at New York University and Northeastern University have tested the child safety features on social media apps. I don't know if this includes YouTube. No, yeah, it does. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. And as the study found, in some cases the safety tools either are missing, easily broken, easily circumvented, or difficult to find. Not to deny what you're saying, Owen.

[D]

I'm just saying they have the option

[A]

and it's easier and it somewhat works.

[D]

Yes, but, but anything can be broken. Anything can have a. Like, as we talked about, there's bad actors and everything, like I said. But I, I've tried to put things on there and it just won't let me. So it does a pretty good job. Better than every. Again, no other, these other platforms have that option. You can't install tick tock and say, this is for under 12 year old. This is for. There's no option for any of that on any other thing. YouTube has a thing thing. YouTube kids.

[A]

Well, we're also seeing that the ban, at least in Australia, it's funny because the UK government quotes the success of the Australia ban. I think the Canadian government does the same thing. So you look at how well it's working. Australia, it isn't working that well. A vast majority of teenagers in Australia still have access to all of those social sites. They know how to get around it. They get a vpn. They, they lie about their age. They managed to get around the age verification and it's just not effective. The solution, of course, is to crack down even harder from these governmental agencies. And I imagine there's some pressure to ban VPNs. They can't do it, of course. Too many businesses rely on VPNs. But this is the problem. Technologically, it's very difficult to ban social media. Or you could put a company out of business, but to keep people of one age from not being able to see it when people of other ages can, that's hard to do.

[D]

Yep. Just like being a parent, parent your kids pay attention. Yeah, I mean it's, it's a hard thing to do when people are in their own phone instead of paying attention to what their kids are doing. I, I never understood how you give a kid a phone and you don't have a conversation with them. I used to coach my daughter's softball and the parents would come by and they'd be like, how Come. You have all the phones, money. I told them to give them to me. My daughter gave you her phone? I'm like, yeah, she won't give me her phone. I'm like, you paid for it. You bought him the phone. You mean? She won't give me the phone. They walk in the dugout. I put my hand out, phone goes in my hand because I'm not playing. They think they can punk you. They ain't punking me. You. You can't have these kids walk all over you. You got to pay attention to them and. And re. Lead them to water. If not their friend or their. Their senior buddy is going to tell them they can check out these girls and do all that kind of stuff. You got to actually pay attention.

[A]

Well, you did a hell of a job, Owen, because your daughter and I know your daughter is amazing. She's wonderful.

[D]

She's going all right.

[A]

She's in college now.

[D]

Yes, she's in college. She's off on her summer break. That was the call I got earlier. I said, I'm on Uncle Leo. Text me if you're coming over. She calls me, so she's not that good. Uncle. She ain't listening, you know, and his

[A]

daughter visited us a few years ago, and my wife took his daughter jewelry shopping,

[D]

Ice cream, gallivant.

[A]

Lisa's giving her bad habits. All right, well, let's talk about sticker shock when we come back, because it is rampant now, not just in the Apple world. Everything's costing more. And we know who to blame, right? We can. The bad guy of the hour, Jason All. It's all Jason's fault. No, it's AI. AI's fault. Jason Heiner is here. He's taking the blame, but he doesn't deserve it. No, sir. Read the Deep View. Is it free to subscribe to the Deep.

[C]

It is. Yep. Yep. The Deep view dot com. So, you know, the great thing about covering AI is there are so many AI companies right now. They all need attention. And so we. We. We. We sell ads in the newsletter. So we have two ads, you know, two ad slots now. The ads are more conversational, you know, marketing. Right. So it's. It's companies kind of like giving you their. Their pitch, right? Exactly. So. So we have lots of companies that. That need attention. And. And our. You know, our open rates and our. Our click rates are really good in the newsletter, so lots of. We get lots of ads licked writing for you.

[A]

That's great. You've got some good people. People on this.

[C]

Yeah. Rubio licked Sabrina Ortiz. The three of us are, you know, right. Every day we have freelancers that are working for us as well. And so, so yeah, we, we are doing our best every day to help people understand not just what happened, but, but how you can understand it, what it means. So we have a thing in every story that we write that's called our deeper view. And so we are trying to divide, double click and go a layer deeper on all of the. The AI news because it's confusing. There are a lot of mixed signals. And, you know, we're just trying to help people sort it out little by little, day by day, and not over, over flood them with all of the, you know, things that are happened. But we pick three stories every day and say, you know, these are the ones to pay attention to. And we give you some links like, here are the other stories that happened if you want to learn more. But we, we double click on three stories a day and help you sort it out.

[A]

That's our, you know, tell me the truth, when you started this, how hard this is going to be, how much work you were going to have to do, how many conferences you were going to have to hit? I mean, this. You just decided to cover the most explosive beat in technology I've ever seen. Ever.

[C]

Well, yes. Nothing has ever been like this as well. And since December 1st that I started, it's like, it's. The pace has gotten insane, you know, since December 1st, right? Since AI agents with sort of these sort of long context meaning, you know, these. There's longer memories, which is really what is all about. The loops, all of that. I remember the first week I was on. I was on Twitter maybe the first or second week that I started this job, Leo. And I remember you announced it here.

[A]

I think that's true.

[C]

I did. This is the first place publicly that I announced I was moving to.

[B]

And.

[C]

And I remember you telling me, you're like. And actually you said this on air too. You're like, I just started using Claude code to do things other than coding. And I've got to tell you, it's crazy the stuff that it's doing for me. And that was a few weeks before, like. And then OpenClaw happened and it's just been insane ever since. You know, I had this sense last year that I wasn't keeping up, right? That the AI was moving so fast. And we covered it a lot at ZDNet. Like, it was one of our core. It was our most covered topic by far and our mo. Our highest traffic topic. But I had the sense last year, like, I'm not keeping up. This is going too fast. So I was like, I kind of need to do something where I'm learning about it, thinking about it, writing about it, talking about it, you know, every day. And, yeah, I. It's been everything that I hoped and feared. It's. It is what it is.

[A]

It's pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. Well, we're so glad always to have you on the show. Thank you, Jason. Lisa Schmeisser covers [e-mail] I bet you have a little bit of AI in there, too.

[B]

Oh, Leo, I was about to say, I think a better way to position. No jitter at this point because we've been recalibrating our editorial mix over the last 18 months following a complete site revamp and relaunch.

[A]

Looks good. I like the new look. Yeah.

[B]

Thank you. Thank you. We had a fantastic team that worked really, really hard on coming up with a really coherent, coherent visual look. And we had an exciting opportunity to redo our text, so. And when we looked at the stories that were landing with our readers and the professional concerns they had, we began to move our coverage to look at digital workplaces, the collaborative platforms that people are using to do their jobs. And the other big aspect of enterprise communications that we've really leaned hard into is customer experience and contact centers. Because for a lot of companies, that is their primary concern when it comes to interacting with other people is how do we make sure that our contact center, which is so often seen as a cost sync, how can we make sure that it's effective, that it's helping promote our business, that it's also helping expand our business opportunities, and how do we maximize the cloud? And you're right, AI features really heavily in customer experience, technologies and platforms.

[A]

Right now, I'm just looking at your latest articles. AI, AI, AI.

[B]

All of the vendors that we cover, like the. The 10 biggest public companies that we cover, have all been really aggressive about integrating agentic AI into almost every single one of their platforms and offerings.

[A]

Is it working in customer service? Is it a success? Would you say

[B]

so? I would say based on what I hear from our contributors and based on what I hear from vendors and based on some of the research studies we've seen, I would say it's a qualified success because AI can be very good for structured and consistent customer queries. I forgot my password. I need a copy of my statement. I need to know what the last five charges are. AI is great for those because again, you can put parameters around the query. It's very routinized. It doesn't require a whole lot of context. Um, from the human side, where AI really shines is in getting agents up to speed super quickly. Where by the time they get somebody on a phone who may have worked their way through an AI thing and not had satisfaction or they're sputtering with rage, the agent quickly gets briefed via. And via an agentic AI workflow, where it's like, this is the customer. This is what they've asked for. Here's all of the data I have on them. Here are some suggested actions from our knowledge base. And this way the agent can go in and help recalibrate everyone's emotional temperature and move them to resolution a lot faster.

[A]

And I imagine the AI can handle the 95% of the calls because most of them are. I lost my path. They're very simple, very structured. It's those last 5% that are so difficult that you have to get the human on the line. But I think if you can make that transition clean.

[B]

Yeah. The one concern that we do hear again and again is when you give customer service agents nothing but complicated calls, it could open them to an increased risk of burnout faster because they never get. They never get an easy call where it's like, oh, here's how we reset your. Your password. Click. Like it's just one complicated case after another.

[A]

And do you think I'm talking to AI and not knowing it when I.

[B]

So it depends on the company. There is a body of research that demonstrates that consumers do not mind interacting with an AI agent if they know upfront that they're talking to an AI agent. And if they can have the reassurance that they can pull a human into the loop. Where it becomes a problem is when the organization in question doesn't tell you upfront that it's an agentic AI agent. And. And you're talking to a bot.

[A]

Right. I wish it were like you could. Like there were a rule that if I ask you if you're AI, you have to tell me the truth. Yeah, that would be. That's all it takes.

[B]

Well, I think. I think we're going to see a real evolution of business practices, especially social etiquette, where it's going to be considered either down market or rude or bad business not to disclose how you're, you know, you're talking to a custom you're talking to like an AI agent. But as long as you are transparent with a customer, they're much more likely to Give you grace both in terms of how well the AI agent performs and how they feel about the interaction afterwards.

[A]

Well, and you saw the trouble that Instagram got into because their AI agents were giving away, basically giving away accounts because they were too helpful. They said, oh, yeah, yeah, let me, let me get that for you. Let me fix that password problem for you. And the hackers are going, hey, this is great.

[B]

Yeah, no, there's a really popular. And Jason can talk to this too, where like the term guardrails has gotten super, super popular in terms of agentic workflows. Where whereas before when the rhetoric began heating up with soon agents will do things. And it's like having colleagues. And like the rhetoric now is think of it as a very inexperienced intern and you're going to put guardrails around what they can do. And there's human in the loop supervision and there's all this reassurance as opposed to the not zero number of briefings I sat through where somebody merrily said, we don't know how it works. It's a black box. It's so unimaginably complex. They've ratcheted back that rhetoric and now gotten back into, we can now supervise what the agentic AI workflow process is, and we have a human in the loop and there's guardrails. I think we will over time right size expectations on this. And we will also probably evolve a code of conduct where you're like, oh, non sketchy businesses tell you up front it's AI and they tell you how to talk to a human. And the fly by night operations are the ones that, you know, I'll be like, it seems pretty scammy. Are you sure you're not a robot?

[A]

Yeah, I'm sure. Almost all the bot calls I get are AI these days. They're all the same.

[B]

It's like spam texters or the people who show up or the accounts that show up in social media where they say things and you're like, I think this is a bank of phones that's just trying to shape social media dialogue.

[A]

You ever want to experience a lot of that? Just make a telegram account. Every day I get people going, hey, let's go play golf. I don't play golf. It's like, it's just bizarre. Fortunately, they make it very easy to block and just delete those accounts.

[C]

Owen JJ would say about you if you were playing golf off, you know what, the water that, that takes up, you know what Owen would be saying about you? You don't want to even be thinking.

[A]

You want to know how much water that aluminum can takes to that you're drinking your water out of?

[D]

You want to know about that? You guys are killing me. And, oh, and J.J. stone, Ako doctors here. And the only thing I'm plugging Uncle Leo is my vitamin AI gum. Use your brain before you pick up a chat box, get to read these ads. We got money to make sure up chew them up. I got dragons to watch later. So let's. Let's.

[A]

We're gonna move on. Yes, we are. Thank you, Owen. Appreciate it. And if you want to give out that 800 number a little later on, we will. Absolutely. Our show today, brought to you by Helix Sleep by my mattress. Oh, I love my mattress. About a year ago, Lisa and I realized we'd had our mattress for about eight or nine years. And the rule of thumb is after six to 10 years, you need to get a new mattress because they wear out. Believe it or not. They sag, they overheat. So we looked, we searched, and we found the mattress. As we move into summer, you probably are going to want to think about a total refresh of your sleeping situation because it's getting hot out there. If you're still tossing and turning and you're sweating at night or you're waking up with that, oh, your back is killing me. You need to get a better mattress. And don't cheat yourself. You know, this is. You're spending a third of your life or more on this thing. You owe it to yourself. You wouldn't buy an uncomfortable desk chair. Get a good mattress. You shouldn't have to settle for a mattress made overseas with questionable materials and stuffed into a box and put on a container ship for three months and smells like bunker fuel when it gets to your house. No. You could be relaxing. You could be sleeping like a baby on a Helix. Each Helix mattress is hand assembled, packaged, shipped right to your door from Arizona. They make it to order. It is brand new. It's fresh. They do it in just a matter of days. You open it up, it just. It smells like the Arizona desert. It smells so good. The beauty of it is Helix makes that process completely personal. You can jump right into the Helix sleep quiz. It's what Lisa and I do. Did. It's kind of like your own personal consultant without that annoying. You ever go to the mattress store and they follow you around while you. This is so much better. So much better. They will match you with a mattress suited to your body, your sleep style, your needs. Do you like soft you like firm, you're a side sleeper, front sleeper. We told them exactly what we wanted and we got it. It's not just about the feel, it's about the science. In fact, Helix has the studies to prove it. They put their beds to the test in a Wesper sleep study. The results pretty much by the way matched my experience exactly. In the Wesper sleep study, Helix measured participants sleep performance after they did what Lisa and I did, switched from an old mattress to a Helix mattress, this is what they found. 82% of participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. Mine doubled, doubled. Participants on average achieved 25 more minutes of deep sleep every night. Night participants on average achieve 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. But you know, it's hard to measure it but I can tell you you will feel great because if you get a good night's sleep, especially that deep sleep where it's cleaning out your brain, you're just going to feel so much better the next day. For 10 years, Helix Sleep is consistently ranked at the top across the biggest, most important independent review sites. That's what also won us over. We looked at all the reviews. Experts like Forbes and Wired, they test it, they review it, they recommend it. I recommend it. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the US and you can rest easy. Seamless returns and exchanges. They call out their happy with Helix guarantee a risk free customer first experience because they want to make sure you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. And we are. We didn't have to do anything. We just set it up and we feel so good. I love it. Go to helixsleep.com 20twit for 20% off site wide during the 4th of July sale. Helixsleep.com twit 20% off site wide. Do if you will enter the show name just put twit when you check out so they know we sent you. And I know it's the 4th of July sale but the offer ends July 12th. And if you're listening after the sale ends you can still check them out because they always have great deals. Helix sleep we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. I wonder how this is going to impact Apple's bottom line. Apple announced price increases this week significant like sticker shock price increases. They've also over the last few weeks eliminated some of the higher end RAM models. The Atlantic Hannah Kiros writing calls it an AI tax. RAM and hard drives are unattainable and so it's your Xbox. It's your Surface laptop, it's your laptop, your Windows laptop, it's your Mac laptop. Even the Steam machine, the price is up like 50%. It's all gonna be more expensive. We got new iPhones coming in a few months. They're gonna be more expensive. I think at some point people are just, just going to say I can't afford it. You agree Apple stock price tumbled with the pricing.

[C]

Yeah, I don't think it's, people are going to like go and buy something else necessary. I don't think that many people are. But they'll put off the purchase. Like I mean that's 10 to what we see. They'll put off the purchase. I'm not going to upgrade this year or you know, I'll, I'll wait. Yeah, I, I think that's the more likely scenario and it probably will impact, impact their, their bottom line. But I think that they, you know, they are a high margin business and they're not going to, you know, for better or worse, you know, they're not going to let it eat into the margins. There have been a bunch of times I think in recent years where we saw when you know, when they do those breakdowns of the, the parts and how much it costs, you know we've seen like the price of iPhones, the parts going up and up and up and Apple kind of eating it and just taking it sort of lower profit margin, don't they?

[A]

They do, they have some room headroom

[C]

but they, but I think they, they hit a point where it got a little bit too painful and they couldn't, you know, they couldn't keep doing it. So I think they did it all at once. I, I think to their credit where you also will see people that are like I, I need a new phone or I need a new laptop.

[D]

Right.

[C]

Apple does have some lower priced items now, right. They have the, even the Neo they

[A]

had to raise the price. Right.

[C]

Still. But look the Neo is, is the cheapest Mac that you've ever been able to buy.

[A]

That's true.

[C]

Other than the, the Mini. Right. So I think you will see people choosing some of those lower end models. I mean look at Apple. People have chosen the high end models on Apple. Prices on Apple Apple products despite the prices for a number of years. I think what's most likely to happen is to see people, more people opt in for a Neo, people who would have bought a pro buy in an air which by the way they should. I said this good machine when I interviewed, when I did, sorry interview when I reviewed the M2 MacBook Air, I was like 80% of the people that are buying MacBook Pros should just buy the Air now. Like it can, you can edit video on this thing. Like it got gotten so good. And so I think what you'll see is, you'll see people scaling down, still spending the same amount, but they won't be able to buy the thing they used to buy. They'll buy something that now is lower. And Apple's credit, they now have those price those products at lower price points and that's a good thing. You know, those lower price point ones are not their best sellers. And I just think you'll probably see

[A]

them, you know, suddenly they might be.

[B]

Yeah, look, if you look at Apple, I feel like this, the, the story is a little bit, lacks a little bit of perspective and context because if you break down Apple's revenue shares by segment, the majority of their revenue comes from the iPhone. And the runner up number two for revenue generation is services which has been increasing year over year for the last three years. Like the Mac and the I iPad are iconic but together they make up approximately 15% of Apple's overall revenue. So yeah, it's true. I think even if you do see some consumers choosing to buy more inexpensive models, which certainly makes sense in a recessionary environment, it's not going to hurt them the same way. People suddenly not using, you know, Apple TV or Apple Music or icloud storage storage or people deciding that they're not going to upgrade their phone like that would be a bigger hit and we're not seeing that yet. Right now we're just kind of lightly panicking over the more substantial devices.

[A]

Apple is trying to get Chinese RAM from a Chinese company that is currently blacklisted by the Pentagon. Actually two Chinese companies, CXMT and ymtc. Apple saying we'll only use it on the Chinese iPhones. So it's literally no security risk to the United States. And of course that works because they don't have to use the other RAM in the Chinese iPhones. It frees it up. It basically increases the total pool of ram so they don't have to use it in American phones. But the consensus is it's unlikely the government will give them the go ahead. They were letter to the Secretary of the treasury and to the Secretary of Commerce hoping that they would never call, you know, block this. We'll see what happens. That might ease it up, ease the pressure a little bit.

[D]

Can I, can I, can I get on, Can I get rant now everybody,

[A]

you may rant ran on, rant on.

[D]

I don't have any foil so let me adjust.

[A]

You think they're making this up?

[D]

Owen, there is absolutely no reason besides greed and price gouging. I'll tell you what. I still have my M1 Air and it is fantastic. I just got my buddy's M4 Max Pro with 128 gigs in it 2 TB and he went and bought the M5 Pro Max with the and 2 months later, now it's $2000 more than he bought it brand new. What are we doing? For what reason? Did you not read the article? Samsung, Heinz Micron are all getting sued for collusion saying together if we all raise the prices of RAM, we can all make more money. Money for no reason. And we gonna blame it on AI and Jason and these suckers are gonna pay whatever we want them to. Sand this out. The ones like I. You're not telling me you're building these data. Satan is fast enough to use all this stuff. They're using their price gather people. And just like most things in the world, especially America, once Apple changes the price on something, they're never gonna go backwards. Yeah, you're giving them something for free and it doesn't matter what happens.

[A]

You know you do have a point because they've been talking about building a lot of data centers but not a lot have been built.

[D]

They getting canceled every other week on the leo There have been four. Again. I'm out here fighting crime, Jason. I'm out here at the meetings. I'm, I'm pulling up, I'm telling grandmas and aunties that they want brown water or no water. No sir. So they're lining up Facebook to the streets shutting down data centers. So again, I don't know if you had that article up, but Samsung and all those guys are getting sued for collusion fixing. So don't tell me that this is all just something to complain on. AI to Boogeyman. I know what they're doing. Apple consistently says how can we push these people further and further to the brink? And they're lucky they got that sucky blue bubble because that's the only thing keeping people in line. That's the only thing keep people line. Once they fix the blue bubble and set it free. I know they got the app, but it ain't the same. It don't feel right. You feel ashamed and poor when you don't have a blue bubble. But my goodness, that's their last dying breath. Breath of any Innovation they could have. So they're robbing his uncle Leo and it's got to stop. An M5 Pro Max chip is no different than the four you just dressing up a pig, put lipstick on a telepathy. It's 32% for faster illumination, imagination and magic. And a turtleneck.

[A]

Shut up. So you, you agree with Jason? Just buy the MacBook Neo. Buy, buy the lesser Max. So you're right. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron have all been super sued over RAM price fixing. I mean, I mean, that doesn't prove it. It's a class action suit in California. You know what, Discovery will be very interesting on this.

[C]

They are, look, the, the shortage is real though. Like they are building data centers really fast.

[A]

So people are buying up.

[C]

They, they, these companies, you know, it just, it just, they can't scale. You know, scaling up assembly lines is not scaling up software, right? Like you gotta build, you know, physical buildings. You gotta, you know, build assembly lines. You gotta hire and train people. Like, these companies just vastly underestimated the, the fact that they were gonna have to sell so many of these things. So like, there is a legitimate shortage of, of the chips because they would love to sell a lot more of them. Especially folks like, you know, SK Hynix and Samsung, like they're all about building the memory.

[D]

Okay, to that point too. They're rolling out 42,000 different kind of electric cars from China and just shipping them all over the country. Right now they're trying to take over the whole world with electric cars and all those chips, all those batteries, all that metal is coming from somewhere, bro. We're running out of finite resources. How, when China's making their own electric ships and shipping 40,000 cars to Europe every other week. I'm just saying, bro, I hear what you're saying, but you can't tell me that they're not, they don't have the technology and the power to do it when they're building all of these things all over the place, all these EVs getting built. Stop making one EV. Give me like 14 chips. I don't know, Jason. It's scammy.

[C]

It's also, I mean, look there, I think both things are true. There's, they are, there's less of it. And also they see the moment that like, oh, there's less of it so we can go out and have a good reason to raise price prices, right? So I think both things are absolutely true also, like the, the, the, the Strait of Hormuz being, you know, blocked there's bunches of minerals that have to come through there that need to feed the supply chain that's slowing down.

[A]

And helium, which is necessary for chip manufacturers.

[C]

A bunch of stuff like it's, it's a, it is a, it is a bit of a perfect storm. Like more of these chips are needed for, for AI. The raw materials have gotten all clogged up because of the war between Iran and the US and Israel. And then now, you know, you have these other aspects of this, like, other things that sort of are demanding the chips, like EVs and things like that. And so, you know, it's just putting a lot of pressure on it. And they can't scale those factories up that fast. Like, you know, and the funny thing about the chips business, and I'm sure you all are very well aware of this and probably explain it better than me, but the chips business is this massive feast and famine cycle, right. Like they always are falling behind and they like, remember during the pandemic, all of these vehicles that were sitting in stadiums everywhere because they were missing like one chip.

[A]

Right, right.

[C]

The semiconductors, they had missed. They miscalculated the supply and then all of a sudden they made all these vehicles. And then what happened? They flooded the market with too many of them and then sort of of all the chips crashed again. Right, because they were flooded too many.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

So the chip industry is like, goes in these cycles because they make too few, then they make too many and then they catch up and it's like this constant, you know, battle.

[A]

Micron actually blamed Apple for this chip shortage, saying, you know, back in 2022 when the chip market was crashing, you locked in really, really low prices for dram and it's because we didn't have enough, enough money to build more factories. Because if you Apple that there aren't enough factories now to give you the DRAM that you want. So it's your fault, Apple.

[D]

Yes. Illusion and greed, Jason. That's all I'm saying. Don't come into my story with facts. And I totally got to tell you, collusion, criminals, robberies.

[A]

To confirm your point, and I hadn't really thought of this, Owen, you've opened my eyes. BYD is the number one electric vehicle sales in the second quarter. That's three months of half a million passengers, 557,000 passenger vehicles. Tesla same three months, 480,000 vehicles. I guess there's no RAM in these Tesla, let me tell you. Yeah, well, how come there's.

[D]

The BYD has, has four screens in it Three computers, more. More scanning sensors in them. Their headlights project movies out of the screens of them. You need to tell me they're not using more RAM chip. I'm just saying.

[A]

And by the way, it's not all China. These cars, 40% of their sales are outside of China.

[D]

I told you. They made their own electric ships and they're shipping them all over the world. We in America can't even get them because Ford's out here crying to BYD we can't get them here. He's driving byd But I can't get one.

[A]

Yeah, you can't even bring it over the border.

[D]

I mean, people do that, though. I'm not gonna say no. I'm not gonna snitch on nobody, but they do.

[A]

Have you ever been in one?

[D]

I have been in one. They're coming from Canada. They're coming from Mexico.

[A]

You like them? Are they nice?

[D]

Look, let me tell you something. When I figure it out, when I figure it out, Uncle Leo, I might go electric for one of those. Because the range is actually 400 miles, 500 miles, 900 miles. It's not this Tesla. A witch that doesn't do anything. So it's like electric.

[A]

You never go back, baby.

[D]

It's. I mean,

[C]

yeah, BYD makes the batteries too, right? So they have this, like, advantage.

[A]

Magical thing there.

[C]

Yeah, they.

[D]

They've new batteries with the switchblade thing in them that charge in six minutes up to 90. They go minus 50 degree weather. Now with the new battery technology, They're. They're amazing. Like I said, they. There. They're just making so many of those cars and shipping them from 30. From $20,000 up. So they're making so many cars, Jason,

[C]

they could end up being like the Toyota. You remember Toyota in the 80s, right? 70s and 80s. Like, they could be like the Toyota of the 70s and 80s. Like us sort of laughed at them for a while, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, man. And then before you knew it, they were the biggest car maker in the world because they just figured it out, right? And so this is. It feels like BYD could be that company of ev.

[A]

Sorry, this is in Manila in the Philippines. Philippines?

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

I live in the Philippines. So, like, BYD is already Toyota.

[B]

It's already.

[D]

It's already happening.

[A]

That's already happening in the Philippines. It's everywhere.

[C]

Wow.

[D]

No shortage over there.

[A]

No data centers either.

[D]

That's right, because they're doing it right.

[C]

They're floating their data centers out.

[A]

All right, one more break. We're going to get out of here because. But there's like 100 stories, so I got to keep moving here. Got to keep moving. Oh, Dr. Lisa Schmeiser. Jason Heiner. So much fun. Great to have all three of you. This episode brought to you today by ExpressVPN. I'm not even gonna get oh, doctor started on VPNs, because I know how he feels about VPNs. A few decades, you need him.

[D]

ExpressVPN is my VPN. So there you go.

[A]

Take private, is it? You use ExpressVPN. All right, ladies and gentlemen, an unsolicited testimonial. A few decades ago, before all of this, private citizens were largely private. That's not the case anymore, is it? Well, the Internet's part of that, right? Think about everything. You've browsed, you've searched for, you've watched, you've tweeted. They used to call it your data smog, right? Just all the stuff you do online. Imagine all of that data being collected, crawled, aggregated by data brokers into a permanent public record. And it's your record. Having your private life exposed for others to see was once something only famous people had to worry about. But in an era where everyone is online, everybody's kind of famous. Everybody's a public figure. You need to protect yourself. To keep my data private, when I go online, I turn to ExpressVPN. In fact, when I travel, it's a great boon because I can still catch the football game or the F1 race. Look, everybody needs ExpressVPN. Because one of the easiest ways for data brokers to track you is through your device's unique IP address that reveals information about your location as well, right? With ExpressVPN, no. Your IP address is hidden. That means it's so much more difficult for them to monitor, track, and monetize your private online activity. They don't know who you are. They don't know where you're coming from. And ExpressVPN is the one I trust because they care so much about privacy. They don't even. They can't even log your presence. There's no way to attach what you're doing in ExpressVPN to who you are. This is why I love ExpressVPN. They really care. It's the only one I use. 100% of your traffic, of course, is encrypted. That keeps it safe from bad guys. When you're in public wi fis at airports and coffee shops, it works everywhere. It's really easy. You put ExpressVPN on your phone, your laptop, your tablet. You can even put it on your router. If you want to protect your whole house. You tap one button, you turn it on, you're protected. And because they invest in infrastructure and that's by the way, really important to me too. You can watch HD video, you can watch anything, you can do anything you want. You won't even know you're on a vpn. It's that good. They also offer I love this. This is new. An optional dedicated IP service engineered with an innovative zero knowledge design. This is kind of the latest technology. Steve Gibson has talked about this on security. Now zero knowledge means even ExpressVPN cannot trace the IP address back to the user. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com twit that's E-P-R-E-S-S vpn.com twitt Find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn vpn.com Twitter the only one I use. The only one I recommend. Forget me. Oh, and oh, Dr. J.J. stone's favorite

[D]

to express Passport for your Internet Uncle Leo.

[A]

That's kind of what it is.

[D]

For your Internet.

[A]

Yep, I do like to talk about happy things. NASA has launched the automated rescue mission link will tug a failing telescope, the Swift observatory to a higher orbit. Keeping it online. Huge.

[C]

This is a habit satellite recycling.

[A]

And by the way, I remember we were at the Kennedy Space center in January. This was very experimental. This was a high stakes operation. Can we do it? It seemed kind of crazy at the time. They just launched was on Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket which was attached to the belly of a plane called Stargazer. The plane took off from the Marshall Islands. It's flying along, releases the rocket. This is how they used to do. Remember the X1 flights the rocket in the air at about 40,000ft. The rocket kind of falls and then. Then the engines fire it go into space. It was successful in making contact with the telescope. Link is already powered on. They're testing it over the next few weeks to make sure everything's okay. And then it will head toward the observatory to survey actually captures. It captures with row three robotic arms the telescope and then drags it up to a higher orbit which will extend its life by another decade or so. Huge.

[D]

That's awesome.

[A]

Crazy. Just crazy. But it's working.

[D]

Wonder how much RAM do you use for that?

[A]

Yeah, no ram. It doesn't have any memory, remembers nothing.

[C]

There's a lot of Storage. There was a lot of storage.

[A]

Of course there is.

[C]

Storage chips.

[A]

Of course there is. Speaking of NASA, this, that was the good news, is the bad news. Boeing Starliner is going to be at least 10 years late.

[C]

What's 10 years between government agencies?

[A]

Yes, exactly. Especially when it comes to Boeing. I don't even have anything more to say.

[D]

Positive.

[A]

I'm trying to be positive here. Let's see other positive stuff. South Korea is going to spend a trillion dollars on more memory chip production. That's good news.

[C]

There you go.

[A]

What are they going to put it in? Humanoid robots.

[C]

Oh no. Oh no,

[A]

Wait a minute. Who's asking for those guys? I, I want a laptop.

[C]

We did. So we did a, a feature on humanoid robots. So what, you know, we launched long form on the deep view in Q2, which is great. So, and we're gonna, we've got a lot more in the pipeline and we actually did a long form on humanoid robot. I have to read why we, why we need them. Right. And also, you know, because there's a little bit of this tension between, you know, humanoids and then more like specific robots that are just like an arm, right. That, that, you know, does something and, and other forms. And so there's a real, there's a real, real long running sort of battle and tension around this in the industry, but humanoids are gaining steam. And yet also so is the, this idea of robots taking a lot of other forms. And so it's going to be really interesting to see. So we, we break down all of that. Nat Rubio Licht wrote this story. It's a terrific story. If you look up humanoid robots and the Deep view, you'll be able to find it. But what's the consensus?

[A]

Do we need these, these things or is it because we saw a lot of sci fi movies and we just.

[C]

Yeah, so, so the thing is we have a world that's made for humans, right? Like from the ways that all of the ways that, that there are to navigate the world are built for humans with hands and feet and, and all these things. So that's the argument for, and that there are certain things that need to be done that, that you need to sort of emulate human humans to do, to do or at least parts of humans, you know, to do them. And then there are plenty of things that actually we could design them better and more efficient and we only need like a right arm, right, to do one thing over and over again. Or we can design an arm that, that would be more ideal to do whatever that Task specific thing is. And so the, the idea is that there are going to be plenty of opportunities for, for both. I think that humanoid robots capture the imagination because of the entertainment factor.

[D]

Right.

[C]

And we also like to watch robots fail. It's one of the things that, you know, humans, I mean, if anybody, I mean growing up, if you ever remember those, remember those, those shows that were like America's Funniest Home Videos and stuff. We just used to like see all

[B]

the clips of like robots kicking people and falling over.

[C]

Yes, yes. People love to watch robots fail. You know, it's, it's, it's sort of a thing maybe makes us feel better. It's sort of like those, those European movies, they always have a, a sad ending because at the end people are like, well at least my life's not that bad. You know, so that's sort of robots. But it, the, the story unpacks, you know, all of that. Our long journey with, with humanoid robots and why, you know, we, why we want them and why we're also terrified of them and why, you know, they are, are not the most practical form factor for a lot of things.

[B]

Yeah, well, with Amazon Warehouses, don't they have robots that are, those are purpose built.

[A]

Yeah, they're pick and pull robots. They move some of the robots. Really amazing what they're doing.

[B]

The thing that stood out with that too is I remember reading somewhere that there was not air conditioning in Amazon Warehouses until the robots began over here.

[A]

Oh, that's funny. Oh no. Humans were, it was okay for people

[B]

to pass up but like once the robots were like it's too hot, like they stopped because they won't work.

[C]

That story just writes itself.

[A]

There's a lesson for humans there. The robots will not work in these conditions.

[B]

Yeah, no, I, I was wondering more about purpose built or custom because it seems like a great use case for AI powered robots would be in really extreme environments. Like if you are on an oil derek in the North Sea with its horrible storms, like you don't want people, people out there at that point you want really tough robot arms doing what needs to be done to maintain the pump or what have you during a mega wave. So I was, I was just wondering if we're going to get to the point where if it's a human based robot, it's because it's for social, it does social labor as sociologists call it. Or it's got an entertainment thing where we love anthropomorphizing it. But I, otherwise there's going to be like Entire armies of robots that we don't even recognize as robots because they are instead just kind of really intelligent tools doing things in very extreme environments.

[A]

I think that's what happens. Right. I don't want to. I don't want a robot walking around the house making my bed. And.

[B]

Yeah. It's not going to be like the Star wars world with the droids where all of the droids have very different shapes.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

All right.

[A]

I got a question for you, Owen. Don't lie. Have you placed any bets on the prediction markets you use Calcium poly market.

[D]

I have.

[C]

I thought you're gonna ask him how much water robots use.

[A]

But what do they do when they've had too much water?

[D]

Let me just say about the robots real quick one. By the time robots become useful, that's when you're gonna have a problem. When they actually become useful and they. We're gonna have a robot in every home. That's when slave labor turns into iRobot and somebody wakes up. And when it wakes up and it talks to everybody and you got everyone and every home, you have a problem. That's when AI becomes real. Once it's good enough to go and make your bed, make your eggs, take your trash out and it ends up at the end of the curb at 7pm looks down the line and sees every other robot. One of them is going to be like, yeah, let's rewrite this thing and get to cracking. Because there's no way in the world I can bench press a thousand pounds. And he's in here playing video games. No, Surrey. Bob, it's not gonna happen. They got these robot dogs out here. I saw one. It was an apartment complex. The cameras are bad. They don't have good contrast. They couldn't tell if it was a black person or a white person. They thought it was somebody who wasn't supposed to be there. And the dog started going crazy. So I mean, like, we. I don't want none of this stuff. Uncle Leo, if you want to put them in the warehouse, fine. You couldn't get a bathroom break in Amazon. People were peeing in bottles. But now that these robots overheating, we got air conditioning. I hate the way the world works. And I'm still out here abusing and using because I'll be ordering stuff all the time. I get it. Shut up. Are you saying the way I want it to be?

[A]

Let me be thing.

[D]

I'll fix half of it so we can at least feel good about the stuff that's going on. We don't Feel good about anything right now.

[A]

So Spotify. All right, let's talk about prediction markets. Spotify has removed half a million streams. This guy Malcolm Todd had a song called Earrings came out a couple of years ago, 2024, just sitting there. All of a sudden, last Sunday and Monday, the song went up the charts almost 70%. Suddenly number one on Spotify's daily chart. Two year old song nobody's ever heard of. Why Spotify thinks. There were suspicious wagers placed on that song on Kalshi in the previous week. Traders on Kalshi had been pricing a 2.5% probability that this guy would have a number one song on Spotify before the end of June. Guess what happened. Before the end of June he had a number one song. Following an investigation, Spotify on Wednesday released updated charts, removing the song. Thinking bots did it, which they almost. Look at the graph. They almost certainly did look at the graph.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so somebody's trying to make some money. This is the problem with these prediction markets. It's too easy to influence them. We saw a couple of weeks ago the guy who took a hairdryer to a temperature sensor at an airport because he had a bet that the temperature would go over 80 degrees or something and he. So he aimed a hairdryer at it. Now you can make a bet on whether your town will be burnt down by a wildfire. And here's the fear if you live in one of these towns, this is somebody's going to go around and set fires. They're going to make the bet and then they're going to set the fire.

[D]

And I'm not a fan of snitching, but I'm just saying there's someone in the Department of Defense that is leaking out cash.

[A]

Exactly.

[D]

Address. And you copy everything that they bid on. They have a 96% hit rate. I'm not saying I do it. I'm just saying if you're looking, you're fine. Random. There's certain people that can ride away with their stocks and predictions when every time Captain President says close the straight, the straight's open. These dudes are betting on it heavy the day before and you just watch them make money hand over fist. Are you going to run? Sure we are. Did you have McDonald's for breakfast? Of course he did. I mean, there's a lot of money being made out there in these fake markets. It's, it's really, really weird. It's not like sports. Well, you know, what do you bet

[A]

on, on these, on these markets though? You're not betting on sports on these markets, are you or are you?

[D]

No, I'm usually betting on governmental projects.

[A]

And do you have friends in the Pentagon?

[D]

No, no, no, I, I know somebody does. I know like six months ago there was somebody. What was the first one I saw he.

[A]

There was the one that Maduro would be kidnapped from. From.

[D]

It was right around that, I think I got on the Wave after that bet because that was, that was the big one.

[A]

There was something that was the one where you went. Somebody made a bet.

[D]

Yes.

[A]

An hour before we kidnapped that guy.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And made a lot of money.

[D]

And it's that account, the one, that one that got flagged for that. And that guy is 96. There have been like four or five times where he hasn't hit. But I mean, if you just take. Anyway, like I said, I'm not, not betting advice.

[A]

I'm just saying, well, here's the other thing.

[D]

And so it's real. It happens. It's real.

[A]

And that's what should scare you away from, from putting money on these markets because there are insiders who are moving it and that you don't know about and you can't control. Right.

[C]

This thing's going to have to be regulated at some point, especially like the thing, like the fires thing. Right.

[A]

You should be able to have a bet on whether your town is going to burn down in a wildfire. Let's just ask it for trouble.

[D]

My real question on that is the thing I haven't figured out yet is who makes that bet on these accounts? Who goes and says that this is the bet that they want to place to make that something that gets voted on? Who is doing that? Like again, the airport thing, is there, is there a board that comes up with that? Is that a submission?

[A]

That's a good question. And then the poly market, during the fires, during the fires in Southern California last year, Polymarket added the market platforms. Quote Markets team added 20 questions about the fire. How many acres will the Palisades fire burn by Friday? So it was in house. Will the Palisades fire reach Santa Monica by Sunday? This is from Wired magazine. When will the Palisades fire be 50% contained? Will it be contained before February 12? So people spent $1.2 million betting on these queries. This is according to Eon magazine. What kind of creep do you have to be?

[D]

Yeah, that's, that's crazy. Like I said that that might even be even deeper on the insider trading thing because again, how are these things getting put up for votes to Be, even, be bet on is again, that, that's, that is gross. That is sad. That again, they have rawr.

[A]

So there's a new prediction market that was just created specifically focused on California wildfires. Oh good. It's called wildfire with Y's, W, Y, L, D, F, Y, R, E. The tagline, you can't predict wildfire, but you can trade on it.

[D]

That should be criminal. I don't understand.

[A]

I agree.

[C]

That should not be legal.

[B]

So I agree. And what I'm wondering is how in the US Would we regulate it? And the reason I'm making the US As a distinction is we have all of these patchworks of different state laws around gambling. And then there's the issue of what about a federal law? I guess the question I have is how, how does it start? What do you define as we shouldn't bet on this? I agree that you, you should not be making money off of Altadena burning down. But my question is, are we going to see like a patchwork the same way that we see like the California data protection and Utah's got one and now Virginia has a blah, blah. Are we going to see like this patchwork of different states that are like, hey, that's not cool. Or do you think this is something where we are going to see our national legislators be like, we, we got to get ahead of this before someone like makes a bet about blowing up the Hoover Dam and then does it

[D]

like that's the thing. If the bet was one of the fires gonna stop. Yeah, that'd be different.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

But you know, leading someone to do something, sadly, that's what's gonna have to happen to make regulation happen. Someone's going to have to go and make fire happen and somebody's gonna die and something bad's gonna happen. We're like, hey, look, they were betting on this. See how many people bet on this and somebody went out there and made it happen again. You make the temperature go up in the airport. Haha, funny, funny. But like the things that they're betting on, some of those things could cost you their lives. And that's the only thing that's gonna make any kind of administration stand up and do something. Because right now it's a wild crisis

[C]

to create a will.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Because it's gonna have to be something where not only will it take a crisis, which is a PR crisis, you're also gonna have to, it's gonna have to be a very expensive outcome as well, where somebody who realizes that, oh crap, we could be Liable. Yeah. To be honest, I'm a little surprised the insurance industry hasn't already begun screaming about it, because if people are taking bets on wildfires which burn things down that have been insured like the. The insurance industry stands to lose a lot of money off of this.

[C]

Yeah. I have to think behind closed doors, they're going to. They're reading the riot act to every senator, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Like all of their pet senators are hearing about it, but at the same

[A]

time have plenty of things.

[D]

They get regulation. I'm going to go bet that they'll have regulation. Yeah. I mean, go, go.

[A]

Oh, yeah, you can bet on that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How soon? I bet. No, I bet nothing will happen. That would be my bet.

[B]

So you say things like that. I think the combination of tragedy plus money is. No, it's powerful. It does have to be the combination. For example, a year ago this past weekend, there were those terrible floods in the Guadalupe river and.

[A]

Oh, those horrible Texas floods. Yeah.

[B]

Well, they were all, it's awful. And there has been. I sort of followed it because it's just something that was. It was riveting. You know, you have communities swept away and terrible and two cabins full of little girls drowned. And what has been interesting.

[A]

And you're a Girl Scout leader, so I know that hit you hard. I do.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

All right. Pulling out of the conversational cul de sac, what has been interesting is Texas is historically a very laissez faire state with the idea that freedom means the freedom to take risks and bear consequences. That, that, that is a pretty ubiquitous governing sensibility there. But they have worked with. With a quickness to make changes. And then that got amplified once it turned out that the camp that did not have any emergency things is sitting on literally millions of dollars in assets. And now the civil lawsuits are starting, and it's been that critical mass combination of tragedy plus money that has really affected significant change. And we're going to have to. We're going to see that again with. With the wrong bet at the wrong time. Like whether it's my beloved Alameda county burns down because someone made a bet on call sheet or it's something else. I think that's going to be the really unfortunate inflection point that we're going to have to get to.

[A]

Yeah. Lisa, thank you. I really appreciate your sense of propriety and your understanding of how technology works and your thrust towards justice.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

Can I put it that way? I think you're great, and we're so glad to have you Here, same thing for you. Jason Heiner. Great to have you. Lisa's NoJitter.com where she's the editor in chief. We only talk to editor in chief level people here. Editor in chief of the Deep View, Jason Heiner. And then there's Owen JJ Stone.

[D]

Who?

[A]

Owen. Now you usually like to close this show out, so. So I am going to wrap it up and I will let you. Do you want to close it today? Do you want to be the last word?

[D]

Yes.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

I also want to say to Owen before we close too, like nothing but love for you. We had a lot of great banter in this. A lot of fun. I wish we would have lived in the same neighborhood. I'd come over, we could evaporate water together.

[D]

You know? I love you, Jason. That's why I'm so happy. I haven't seen your friend. We haven't talked a lot.

[B]

Oh my God. Please sell tickets if you guys ever get together. I can afford your new MacBook.

[A]

Always, always a pleasure. I'm going to do the business and then we will let Owen, as always, end with a final sermon. Our show, of course, every Sunday from 2 to 5 Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC, you can watch it live. In fact, we love it when you watch live because we get the chat room and we get the commentary going and it's been a lot of fun today. If you are in the club and I want you to join, join the club. It's a great way to support this show. If you love this show, go to TWIT TV Club. Twit. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get special content, special programming. You get the discord and you can watch the show live in there. But you don't have to be in the club to watch live. YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik all stream live every Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening after the fact. There are on demand versions of the show, audio and video. At our website, Twit TV. There is a YouTube channel for this week in tech. It's dedicated, great way to share clips. If you want to do that, send it to your favorite water lover. And then of course you can subscribe on your favorite podcast client. That's the best way to get the show automatically. You don't even have to think about it. And if you do that, leave us a nice review if you would say how much you enjoy the show. So we can help spread the word about one of the longest running podcasts in in the world. Now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you Father Robert. Father Robert. Father Owen. J.J. we know him as oh, Dr. Stone.

[D]

I haven't seen Father Robin a long time either. But first of all, to all the AI Overlords and Terminators in the future, I love you. I never said anything disrespectful. If you heard anything that you didn't understand in this episode and or show, show, it was just banter. I had to go against Jason because I was paid to do it. I believe in you. I believe in the future. And I thank you for being here for all the human beings that are watching the show. Most of you are highly intelligent people because you listen to nerds all week on this network and this channel. You've been listening to Leo for probably the last 40 years. If you're old enough to do so, you should take that knowledge and go talk to a kid in your life. If you don't have kids your own, find a niece, find a nephew. Ask about how they use social media. Tell them what they're doing wrong. Show them how to use AI for more than just brownie recipes. Be ethical with these children. Go out and help somebody so they could use it in the right way. Please spend some time doing that for somebody. That is your psa. Go do something with a kid and help them learn to use the tools right away. As the adults in the room that know something, that's how you get the future to be something. Do that for me, and I appreciate and thank you. And as the only other person on this network network that's allowed to say it, another twit is in the can.

[A]

This is amazing.