AI Boom and San Francisco Real Estate

It's time for Twit this weeknd teech. Ian Thompson is here. Owen Thomas and Doc Rock will talk about Anthropic It looks like the Trump administration' backing down on its ban of fable. We'll see We'll also get some look at the financials of O AI. I got a little tip for you. It ain't good And SpaceX is IPO, it's stratospheric. But how long can it stay up? That whole lot more coming up Twit Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tr it. This is Twit, this week in Tech. episode one thousand eighty nine recorded Sunday, june twenty first, twenty twenty six Robot buttcack. It's time for Twit. This week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Hello everybody. Welcome back to one of the longest running shows in podcasting. And we have a fabulous panel ready for you from Aloha State In Hawaii, mister. Oh, it says your real name on on your Zoom thing. It's notock Rck. Do I never use regular Zoom. I always used a zoom that's built in the eCamp today I was just being brave. You're in regular Zoom. Is it a secret what your real name is or I don't think so, but yeah, I never use it. You just prefer the branding. That's this government name. Y government That's Y government government name. Y this is what is it? the straw man name That is Owen Tom Thomas, who is from the San Francisco Business Times. Hello, Owen. That is both Is realel and his government name It is, you? Yes And soon to have his own United States government name Formerly of the UK, Ian Thompson. They in? yes Hell there, How's it going? It's going great. Your citizenship is arriving in the mail. Well, I have yet to do my biometrics and have the final interview, but What do they collect of your biometrics Fingerprints, eye scans and a facial scan ' And then I've got to pass the American History test, which haaving gone through very have been doing my revision on this. It's like I now re pretty much up to state on the US Constitution s more than probably any American citizen. I was gonna say, you ask for standard American how many members of Congress there are and you get a blank look in most cases. But you know, one of those things, now I know it. I know there's five hundred thirty eight electors Some of those are I don't know, five hundred and twenty eight. five hundred thirty fiveive thirty four. fiveive hundred thirty five. That's not idea. Yeah. But I mean, it's weird. Some of the questions are really weird. It's like, who wrote the federalist paper? five hundred thirty. No no idea. M hundred thirty five We're thirty five from the house. Ity in the House. Yeah. That's why it's five hundred thirty five. It's a hundred senators in four hundred and thirty five. for DC makes it five hundred thirty eight. And that's for electors thirty. Until DC gets statehood and maybe also Puertoico, which would be interesting But yes, we shall see Yes. Well, it's good to see all three of you. Welcome to the program. Two of us are wearing aloha shirts Surprisingly not Doc Rock. The Brit is soon to be the U.S. citizen Ian Thomas. I'm actually wearing a Mexican Aloha shirt. I don't know what would you call that. Well, I mean, I pick this up in Hawaii, which is where you've been from. It's the real deal. Yeah. No I have when I was in Hawaii I bought some nice why insurance, but It looks like Owen and Doc are both fans of what we call in the United States Fotball. Its It's b. Oh w A soccer, but I realize every four years I fall in love with soccer again and then I forget all about it after the World Cup. It's like, okay, back to American football I thought Ted Lasso would get more people understanding how dope the game is, but I think some people just think that's like a show, but noah, I mean, it's it's a good thing. and you're a you're a play you played Yeah, I did play. I played all the way up until my knees quit but I even tried to play in the old manan League, but now my knees don't like it Yeah, it's a fun, it's a fun sport. I think a lot of people think that it's about oh like what happens when nobody scores? I love when people say that. and I'm like, brother, there's so many games where There's lots of scoring. It really just depends on the tacticalness or whether you're saving players for the next game. This is a tournament. So there'll be games where you're definitely not trying to I think Americans we're so used because of football, we're so used to. this kind of rigid progression of the game, like you march down the field, then you march the other way and then you march down the field. And and soccer is much more fluid. It is a little bit more like basketball, but basketball there's a lot more scoring Yeah, Well it is Yeah people forget about the fil go Fest, right? Do we have Fld goo fest every Sunday You back and forth back back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and the whole total score game is six to nine. There' all field goals. Don't act like those games don't happen. Oh it's football. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. especially in NFC. That's quite. We hate those games by the way. one hundred percent. We hate those games When they all su. I mean, I always love the Simpsons episode where they go to the soccer game and it's like, back to so and so, back to so and so, back to so and so. and eventually a riot breaks out. And that's one of my favorite episodes. It's hard not to fall in love with soccer watching the World Cup it really it's a fans, bro. You have to go see a real game. You gott to see a real game and everyone must see a game in Japan I swear that The Japanese clean their stadium up after each match, which is fantastic.' ts. I've got to say the kids school kids don't have they dont have janitors. The school kids clean the school Then a mon later, Leo, the school kids feed each other. That's when you first learn how to be a communal communal c. Yeah Yeah also shout out to the Tartanami because they have won hearts and minds in Boston. I mean if you're wearing a kilt in Boston at the moment, you're probably not buying your first pine. They didn't have a great game, but nevertheless h you got to love those guys. And you're Scott, so yeah. and I have a Sot ancestry I mean,ew when I knew it was going to be a good one when there was a direct flight from Glasgow to Boston full of fans and they ran out of beer midway across the Atlantic. It was just like Whatesome. All credit to the Scots fan who was interviewed by Boston TV and it's like, Yeah, well we drank the bar dry, there was nothing left butud light and we're not going to drink that.. Very nice. Well anyway, good luck to every country. It's hard not to root for them all. and I really root for the underdogs. It's really fun Yeah, When you see Court dvois and you know, I was ro for them all the way, man. Right really. Same with same with Ohh my God, my brain just win Cape Verde, right? when they when they had their draw, that was just incredible. watchatching people get their first goal in their nation's history kind of stuff, you know I just love that DR Kongo or some dude on the thing said Dr. Kongo. Dr. Congo. DR Rock says Dror Kongo. The subars in San Francisco are just going ro up crazy. and you know, the The games are all happening between twelve and nine PM When the World Cup was in I think it was in Japan and South Korea, not. It was terrible hours for the bars. Now it's perfect. Yeah. and yeah, it's And there is something about soccer that it's much better when you're watching with a group Yeah. Oh definitely. ye. Yes.. So they' they're they're putting up screens, you know, we've got the of course the parklets Downtown Penaluma is going to have a screen up for the US game this Thursday. So yeah people people are saying that if the US has a good run then its it's going to be really good for for one hundred percent There were some spendning The the country road at the end of Beating the Aussies like was legit as we say in Hawaii, Chicken skin moment. Like you know what? I'm one of those people I like that song, but I don't like theong the way. A lot of people like that song. My otherother h loves John Denver. But it's something about when that song played and we just won, I was like people like this is what I watch every Sunday, Saturday and Sunday, right? And just listening to that whole entire stadium scing together. We don't even do that in regular footie You know, like sorry, football. We don't do that. we don't have that thing with a team chance. And that's what I like about the game is, you know, when the whole stadium is singing, I'm going to say this's going to hurt my feelings as a Manchester United fan. When you hear those idiots singing, you'll never walk alone and the whole thing is echoing through or you hear to hate Jude or you hear, you know, every every team has their song, right For us is Oh my brain just went dumb. I've been Glory Glory Man United. When you hear that sound, it's just o my Glory Glory Man, you know, I hate. It's an incredible proe. That stuff makes your skin like get the goosebumps. and so it was really neat to see that. And they even played it today in a non US. game in Atlanta, they play the country road and the whole stadium is singing it. They' sing like our song. It's kind ofsterical. That's hsterical. Well, anyway, welcome to this weekeknd World Cup. We actually have other topics, but we thought we'd get The soccer in first because it's gonna be AI all the way down. I'm sorry to s. And I know some of you don't want to hear anything more about AI, but boy It seems like there's always a huge story. The big story of last week was the Trump administration banning Anthropics new very strong model Fable, which was a version of the Mythos model. It said no one can have because it's so good that it can find flaws in software that no one else found. And this would be devastating If it got into the hands of bad guys before it got in the hands of good guys, An anthropic released Essentially, mythos with a number of protections to keep people from using it for AI research, interesterestingly, maybe they didn't want any competition, bioeapons research and cybersecurity research. And it was pretty good, but apparently an Amazon research team able to do something they considered a jailbreak They gave it some flawed software, some intentionally, some not It found the bugs And now at that point it's supposed to stop. They merely said fix fix this software. I can't fix the code, I think was the three. Fix fix this code. Yeah, fix Zorus saw the paper and went through it and she's just It's just like this is not you know threat to national security at schools. Always despite there's much more to this, the US go let me tell you where my quest has techart says. So fix this code. At that point, Fable said, Ohh, yeah, well I can do that. And it it not only found the flaws patch them And this is the thing that's deadly. It wrote a test to check to see if the patch worked. Now the test can check to see if the paths work, but it also can be used on an unpatched piece of software to break it And Amazon's research team said, well, this is problematic because it's not supposed to do that Katie. now They sent this to Anthropic Anthropic sen it to Katie Missouis, who is a very well known security researcher basically invented the bug bounty. She said that before. I mean, she convinced Microsoft and the Pentagon to actually start bug bounty programs rather than threatening to jail people that pointed out problems in the code However Masnk says she is closely associated with Chris Krebs You may remember, certainly the president does six years ago, Chris Krebs, who was at the time the director of CISA in the United States goovernment, said the election of twenty twenty was free and fair. In fact, I think you said it was the most fair election in our history The presresident took Umbraidge because as you know, the big lie is that it wasn't. And fired Krebs has since, by the way, gone after him. He withdrew his global entry. They've been investig theOJ has been investigating him the usual litany of ways that he can be harassed by the federal government And Mike Mazick of Techt says it was Missouri's association with Chris Krebs that convinced the president that anthropic should be shut down. He didn't like it that what he considered a democratic radical A radical Democrat, as he calls him, was involved in this. I don't know if that's the case But something else happened because at the G S seven summit, Dario Omote, the CEO of Panthropic went to the G seven talkaled with Trump And must have offered him something. My theory is he offered him ten percent of the anthropic IPO, which is what OpenAI has already done him not really, but the U.S. government, ten percent of the IPO. somethingomething or perhaps, I don't know, something, maybe maybe the Pentagon who continues to use, by the way, anthropic models and in fact may have access to mythos It's we think something. In any event, in an interview with Axos A couple of days ago, he said, Well, I don't think anthropics is a national security threat anymore Somet happened. Now he hasn't they haven't backed down on the banning. I think that I was a little disappointed that the banning got so little coverage. We covered it, of course I feel like it's a bad precedent for the US government to ban an American company, American product. I don't even think it's legal, but to ban an American product They banned it for use from foreign nationals, but the problem is Anthropic doesn't know your citizenship status. So the only way they can do that effectively is to ban it is to block it for everybody, which they did. That is probably illegal. It's a Comerce Department order But it' I'd liken it too if Trump decided, you know, that iPhone is a really security risk for us all because it made in China, let's ban the iPhone Trum Well I mean, we good. Huh? I' say put Trump phone there's a phone you There's a phone you can trust. I think big overreacher for the federal government without any, they didn't consult Congress, they didn't consult anybody just on a whim to ban an American product. It also causes huge issues because immediately people turned to I turned to a Chinese model, which is quite good Well I mean, we've seen this before with encryption though. I mean, exactly you had there. Yes. Yeah, exactly. which led to one security researcher actually getting code tattooed on his chest, which would there also was a t shirt which ye because of The First Amendment was able to cross the border, even though it was regarded as munition and blocked, that ban didn't end well the United States. They had to withdraw it. They told Mozilla, for instance, well, you can have one hundred and twenty eight bit encryption in the United States, but can' you can only have forty two bit encryption in the rest of the world It just didn't work. No. You have to wonderion never works. You have to wonder how much of this is getting jinned up by openpen AI. Well there's a good question. Yeah Yeah. Who benefits? Cy Bony getting the same thing oing and I was hoping somebody had good thoughts because I hate conspiracy theories, but it out like that, you know? The chief global affairs offfficer of Open AI is Chris Leahane. Chris Lahan was the policy guy at Airbnb who masterminded all of those campaigns to keep, you know these short term home rentals legal and you know, in the hometown of San Francisco and elsewhere U This guy's a mastermind Don't underestimate him Anthropic needs to staff the F up in Washington, D.C Yeah They need to do what Iran reportedly did, which hire hire psychologists to talk with the president because lay him Carly like you know they did, I think, because it worked. R they named the model Trump seven We're good. We're back on. It's so dumb. but I'm not even try to be Donald I to you if they nameam them Donald D. Trpados. Maybe that's what they're. Wait, wait wait. I Mark is two point zero chat GJT broke. they I has done that besides, you know, their president, Greg Brockman donated fifty was it twenty five or fifty million dollars to MAGa Trump's a pack U They have said we're going to give ten percent of the company when we go public, we're going to give that to the federal government for its whatever, sovereign wealth fund So openpen AI has absolutely and remember at the very beginning of Trump's presidency, they announced that what was it five hundred billion dollars Uh I forgot the name of it, because it never happened. Stargate AI plan with Larry Allllison and others. And Sam Altman went to the inaugural. He stood next to President Trump announcing Stargate and this huge investment in the United States. They played the game So sl for sure.. But interestingly, OpAI is rumored to have the next version of Chat GPD, I guess five point six That is Equivalent in capability to fable And actually, as a number of people point out, Alex Stamis was on our show on Wednesday on intntelligent Machines. He created a freefable. org website, which is a list of There's an email, open letter, I should say, probablyably is an email, but it was an open letter to Secretary Lutnik and the Cyber director for National Cyber security Camcross saying, every AI can do what Mythos does. They Mythos is not uniquely good at this There are huge risks to the United States It will it will stymy our AI development It is not the way to do this and man, the signatories to this are huge names. I don't think this was persuasive But but Alex tell this interview was this is ridiculous. This isn't good for us. This isn't good for America. Well apparently Dario Amode said the right things and, you know Sh other. Yeah at the G seven. We don't know what he said. you know, like personal, you know, there is a role, regardless of who the president is for, you know, kind ofobbying CEO Yeah, like, you know, especially for the CEO to be kind of the face of the company. Now, you know the question is whether Amaday Um You know, was this approach kind of over intellectual? L Anthropic was founded basically as an answer to internal concerns among open AI researchers about this kind of issue, the safety. by putting it, ye. Yeah. So they tend to be true believers and they tend to think that like we are so scrupulous about safety that our products, you know must be Must be safe because What of is did he bring on himself by The announcement that this the mythos was too could to be released to the public I mean, he kind of Set this all up, didn't he the funny thing is fable. It has skeletons of mythos, but it wasn't mythhos yet. It's not clear. was not sure that to call it mythos light. A lot of people like,h, its myhos light. I was like, no, there's still things about it that they that they completely I don't think we know that, Doc. I think a lot of people think it's mythos with those restrictions or the classifier on o with the orchestrator on it. Yeah.. I'm sorry conductor, but yeah, I don't know. It's one of those weird weird things where again, I go back to doude, we tried to do the same thing. this is a weird connection, but we tried prohibition with alcohol. It doesn't work We tried prohibition way way back with, you know, like smashing before you get married never worked. We tried, you know, the same thing with quote unquote, the war on drugs. We've spent billions and billions and trillions of dollars on the war and drugs pro more people are twisted now than ever before and a lot of it from the actual you know pharma compies. So like this probhibition thing never ever, ever works. And how is it that nobody in charge has figured out everything we've ever tried to stop doesn't work, and it only leads to doing any illegal stuff, which ends up costing us more money. I do have another theory. I wonder what you guys think If you look at the polls, the American public hates AI. Yeah And I'm wondering if Trump's thinking this isn't remember, his number one job from his point of view at this point is is to survive November And he's not on the ballot, but If Congress swings to the other party, he could be in trouble. But AI is also spending big. I mean, and AI spending big. Yeah. But look at the polls, right? You were talking about a poll. Oh yeah, was that said that something like sixty one percent of people didn't want AI in any of their products. Yeah, sixteen percent said that they actually thought it was helpful. sixteen out of one hundred. Yeah. out of one hundred. Yeah. That's all there is. seventy one percent of Americans surveyed said no data centers near me, buddy Well, I mean, the whole data center thing is fascinating. College graduates are booing C speches You sa this s AI Yeah. Eric there it looked absolutely gobsmoke. was getting booed at a commencement thing. It was a notorious thing to watch. So maybe this is actually putting his finger to the wind and saying, you know It wouldn't be it would be a pretty popular thing to ban AI. That's not where he puts his finger, but. It's, you know what? here's the I don't know' okay, The data center situation has been so overplayed And I'm familiar with one of the Green Bothers, I'm going to say Hank, Hank did on his science channel did like a deep dive on like really how much water and stuff is actually used and how much electricity is actually used. and it's way overplayed by people who never really dug into it. So I think a whole lot of that has to do with scared that's not necessarily real. But I completely agree. If you look at the use of water of golf courses, thank you. I li in Hawaii Yeah. B the way Most some data centers recirculate their water, some don't. they use evaporative cooling But it's all of metas, for instance, data centers use recirculated water. So the water iss not even it's it's not even being But on a golf course it's been sprayed and it's gone one that that's the one that gets everybody in because it's the easiest to cut and sort of understand if you don't understand. right? You don't have to know nothing about tank. you don't have to be a nerd. All you can do is say it uses up all the drinking water. That started it and then it wentca. Oh it's all electricity. Then that's legit though, right? because electrros are going. But how they got all the young people pissed off? This is how they got all the young people pissed off win The strait of Hormz closed and some of the other things that was going down with Ters closed. and chips that we were buying for our memory chips for our gaming computers were eighty bucks are now four five hundred bucks. Okay, now you got all the young people pissed off And they didn't need to know anything else. They didn't study anything else. They didn't dig any deeper. It's if I want to build a gaming machine or I want to buy a console or I want to do some of the cool stuff, I can't do it now because it's cost prohibitive. Already graphic cards were high in the first place because of mining But now graphic cards went really, really crazy. And the only thing win this battle was Apple and now they can't even win anymore because they got to raise prices. mean not just cheapP use, but memory, right? I was talking about. I was talking about memory is the first one. That's everybody off I mean, look at the prices for, for example, you know, removable storage. They're through the roof You know, it's five times what you would have paid a year, you know, a year and a half ago. Not even year or two ago digital M said, we've sold every hard drive we can make through the rest through the end of the year. There you go Yeah, this is benida So isn't that data center stuff though? Isn't that because of data center stuff? They're buying up rem we' saying. Okaykay.'re saying. thoughting're pissed off. Yeah. Okay. We talk to the public, they're worried about the electricity and the noise and oh you're going to catch cancer, a bunch of other stuff that you know, hasn't necessarily been improven. So they're fearing them there But the reality is like I bought a twenty turabyte hard drive in December for two hundred eighty nine. I had to buy a second version a little bit ago and it was seven hundred bucks for the exact same model number. Nothing changed on that drive probablyably even manufactured the same time. So we have some good reasons and add to that that all those college graduates are going, where's the job going Oh yeah. That's what you learn how to do AI. People are terrified understandably. By the way, Apple is starting to beat the drum. For a long time, we said, well, why isn't Apple you know, raising its prices Well, Tim Cook gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal. This is the beginning of what I think will be a campaign now through September saying Apple will have to raise its prices soaring costs make a price increase unavoidable. That's Apple preparered, you know, they this is they're preparing the way, you know, they're saying, okay, okay, okay. becausecause coming in September, there're going to be some big price increases on the number one consumer electronics product, the iPhone And so o so we see why the tide is turned against AI is so maybe the president's just saying, hey, I'm going to jump on this bandwagon. Nobody likes AI. It's suppos fult started with the tariffs. and then you closeed the straight of Hormz. I mean, like a large portion of it is his fault I know, but don't don't Right, But if he can deflect the blame and make Silicon Valley if he can Exactly. And we are so ready to blame Big tech, aren't we? I mean Oh yeah, because that' battle. It's easier battle. We've been primed for a long time to blame bigig tech for everything And the funny thing is, what are you complaining about Big tech on? Not a teleype, not a YS twenty twenty terminal. Well, I think our audience, I would hope our audience, We're technology fans, I think. Yeah. I mean, I admit there are definitely problems with technology. It's not earth friendly. Data centers aren't good for climate change, especially if you use Natural gas to power them as Elon Musk does Oh, illegally as well. Yes. Oh well, the Department of Justice is saying You know what? We use Grock for our war So you can't Oh they're giving him a pass on that. Well, they went to the they went to the court. Now there's a lawsuit going on saying that this is a violation of the environmental rules. And the DOJ says, yeah, but we're going Your Honor, you should give him a pass because we need it Oh for goodness sake, Yeah. It will happen to one everyveryone under one rule, but no, that's another story. We're in an interesting world that we've created for ourselves. I don't know. Okay underwater data center, like completely underwater. Google Google was doing those, rememember? Might now se years ago Daily centers in space. That's one of the reasons SpaceX went off at such a huge value And he became a trillionaires because of this progress, this promise of data centers in space We see, I mean, Microsoft tried the underwater data cent thing off the Shetland Isles in Scotland about four years ago. And yes, it can work, but actually getting to upgrade it, you've got to pull the whole thing out of the water in the first place. You get limpets and barnacles all over it,s clogging up The. cooling vents, it's possible. It's kind of like the SpaceX thing. It's technically ossible to put a data center into space, but nobody's got the technology to do it yet and it's at least five to ten years away. P pllus you've got to all loft the damn thing and you've got to have the bandwidth to send stuff backwards and forwards And this is why the whole SpaceX IPO I read the S one and it's It makes W work look awwardmistic when it camees to their thing So the interesting thing to me about SpaceX is they're obviously a big government contractor Clearly they know how to kind of Whisper in Washington They're kind of a wild card. They' AI revenue, you know likeike the fact that SpaceX is in the AI business is just basasically a recent accident of Elon Musk smashing some of his businesses together,X XAI and SpaceX have all gotten rolled up and Well get ready because Musk, according to New York Times Musk's Next move. Maybe to merge SpaceX and Tesla And that's largely about chips because Tesla is building a a I think it's called a tariffab in Austin.. So that's, you know, the need for Silicon design is is kind of driving that consolidation This, by the way, is one of the reasons he moved All his businesses to Texas. They were in Delaware. Delaware would have probablyro prohibited that He also was kished off because the Delaware court ruled that he shouldn't be getting a trillion dollar pay package. Well, that's, you know, that's the technical headquarters, but I want to point out XAI is actually headquartered in Palo Alto. and Um SpaceX and its S one said that was because of the need for you know, basically strategic recruiting. That's where engineers. The AI engineers are. And SpaceX just pumunked down sixty billion dollars. on a on a San Francisco company called Cursor By the way, is that not spaceX stock I thought was interesting. People didn't especially didn't like that. I don't know Especially since it was a known thing. I mean I was bak in. Yeah. Yeah. it should have been baked in. I think I think that may have just been a pullback from, you know, a really started to think about what they were with you Byan. And if anything, SpaceX got a better deal, right? Because the price was fixed at sixty billion dollars for the IPO. It was all stock went up, which means SpeaceX shareholders paid less as a percentage. They were less diluted It was funoney money by pure virtue of the stock going up by moving to Texas, Texas apparently says it's very difficult for unhappy investors to challenge management decisions according to the Times. So moving to Texas was part of all of this mushing together of all of his All of his companies. Well, I mean fixing getting Tesla to join SpaceX I mean, Tesla is if it weren't for tariffs, Tesla would be a money losing business because they produce very expensive, poorly built electric cars and the Chinese can do the same for forty fifty percent of the cost You know, if you look at what B Wh we say all American car makers are protected by that ban. I now But' not terri it's an actual ban on China Yeah I mean, a friend of mine writes about electric cars for, you know for his living and he's been testing some of these Chinese cars and they are way ahead of what we've got here. Yes. you know, just came I from the UK and I saw some first you know, up close and personal for the first time and I'm like, yo, these are way better than what we hear about on the news here There's a lot of BYD, I was gonna say something else. There's a lot of BYD cars cruising around in UK. and I was in London and Birmingham and I was quite impressed by some of them. I was like, yo, this is actually a pretty decent car So when you go to the ASDa or the test Tesco Yeah, I was say Tesco. Yeah. When you go to TSco orzDa and you see like a whole bunch of them in parking lots. So it's not even like they're not popular either Rite that in Man, we don't have BNW mini wagons here. you guys still have. I love them Oian W station wagers that we don't have them. All right. I want to take a break I am curious, though, what you all think about the notion that And what it would mean if the American people said, no more AI. We don't like big tech, no more big, No more AI, then what would happen It happen couldould it happen? Or would business interests say, no, sorry, we need it. We're going to do it. Yeah I'll celebrate my house purchase in Japan. That's what happens. That is the fastest way to race to the bottom. I mean, we've already been capped by Douifying education and trying to control things that we got no business controlling that's already making us take our eye off the ball long enough to let somebody run past us. Turning off AI completely on some like holiard dao thing, that would totally c We'd be done. We'd be now the word we're not supposed to use anymore as far as world rankings go. Pits I was going for a second and third. What are you thinking Ian? Do we need AI? We have to have it. It's as simple as that. but it needs to be used responsibly. At the moment, we're in the hype cycle phase where companies are loving AI because that's what they've been told to think. What we need is responsible use of AI and above all, responsible use by employers and by employees. It's been used as an excuse to basically downsize large numbers of people And excus the right word because that's not the only reason they're being fired, right? Yeah. Well, no, because people over hired in the lockdown period But it's a good excuse. But it's about responsible use of it and it's about sensible use of it You know, I completely agree. it needs to be regulated in some way. I mean San Francisco is the AI capital of the world. needes AI as an economic driver, right? Yeah. Yeah House prices aren't gonna lose value by themselves, but no it's can stand the pushback against B tech and AI? I really cant Yeah because the whole thing has been mismanaged, you know, it's like AI has been hailed as this golden child, which is going to lift us out and solve world cancer and the rest of it. And it's not there yet. It's not even close to being there yet, but it's being used as an excuse for all kinds of things and I've gott to say, a friend of mine is a teacher and she's really shocked by how young people are adopting this and just trusting it You know, it's they just they will feed their homework assignments into Claude and get complete garbage back and just submit it without checking. You know, it needs to be used responsibly That's a kind of laziness, isn't it I think one of the real concerns, certainly in the education of AI is this is actually though the story of technology in many ways. I was thinking about this with my Aura ring is you start to rely on technology and you stop thinking for yourself. So with the Aura ring I decided to take it off because I was I was using it to gauge how good my sleep was every night Th then I realized the real source of truth in this is how I feel, not what my ring tells me, right? Yeah. And by focusing on my ring, I'm not thinking about how I feel. Same thing with education. If you let Claude do your writing for you, it's so tempting just not to do any thinking at all And for most of us Writing, the reason you learn to write is it's a process of learning to think. Yes, and you'll never learn to think. That is what worries me about it. I mean I've that's not a good outcome. I've what we're already seeing in journalism, for example, When Chat GPT first came out, I looked at it and I thought, every publisher on the planet is going to be watching this and going, Last we can get rid of those pesky journalists. And the amount of slot that's generated by that Not even, you know For example, the largest local newspaper chain in the UK reached. onene of their journalists put out one hundred and ten articles in a single day by using AI And you're just like, this is insanity. It really is. Well, the good news is most people will read it through AI. so they're really's Yeah talking to each other. It's like the old Siri Alexa memes when we first got those, you know, like, Hey, Siri, Hey, Alexa Yeah Theyre talking to each other. Yeah. you know, I'm an AI fanatic. I love AI. I use it in every way but I think you're exactly right that we Ian, we need to think about how we're using it and use it responsibly? Yeah. Yeah I do worry about the environmental impact of it too. That's another'sail you nailed a couple of things. and here's the two things I think about a lot because I really do have these processes. N one I'm like you, I use A a lot all the time. I absolutely love it. I'm having fun trying things. I you know written a couple of apps that I'm playing around with, but I still do morning pages every morning because I learned that in college, right? So I still got my book out, I do my three pages. I write by hand all the time But I also put on my headphones and I do my, you know, seven thousand five hundred steps, I'm walking the block and I'm having a conversation back and forth with Claud. right? And I ha' it synthesized all of those raw brain dumpy thoughts puts it into like A set of notes where it tags everything, reminds me of priorities. becausecause as ADHD person, I can have a straight line conversation. I just It's really useful if you have ADHD. one hundred percent. So it's saving my bacon. It's remind me of things that I need to do. Like the other day, it was like, hey, you know, I noticed you haven't talked about picking up your prescription in a little bit, you do? And I was like, o, yeah, it turns out, I got four pills left I might as well go get that done. You know? So like it's it doess helpful, but I still write every day with fountain pen in my book like, you know, to process that muscle But here's one thing that I think about when it comes to the environmental thing Bunch of agents on their actual papers and less of the people fings and have it help us develop better plans to try to do some things. I think it could even help us fix some of the things that we're doing environmentally. Like I think that it can help us figure out Maybe what we can do with some of these crops that are you know, overall better or for here, it's we're losing whole sides of mountains because we have so much rain recently. I mean, we're talking eight hundred e old trees just dropping in the middle of And it's like, what knowledge would we have? Should we change the grass around this tree in order to shore up the thing? So it does get super wet, this grass absorbs a lot of water and then it will dry by the sun because we're sunny here every day. and they don't have to worry about, you know, eight hundred year old you know, four thousand pound tree dropping in the middle of Waii Ki But couldn't you ask a botanist that? I mean, would AI give you a better answer? We have those botanists that tree still fill. Yeah. sometimes I feel like you like companies will invest in something right now because it's labeled as AI rather than Look at all birds, which is now now smart Bird. Smart Bird. It was a slipper company. They decided that they're going to become an AI data center company. They they and their stuck went through the roof There's smart birds briefly. Yeah So yeah, I mean that's a perfect example. Just label it with AI and everybody will be happy I mean, the thing is we know how to do this stuff. It's whether there is the will to do it. and sticking AI in front of it might drive it forward, but we know how to deal with ecology up to a point. It's just getting the political and social and financial will to actually get it done Um, I'm gonna take a break We have not answered that question definitively, but I guess I would that be a lot to expect on We solved it todayate. It's really matches. I think's fine. We're The next few weeks be we'll be telling, I wonder what's going to happen with Fable. I have a feeling this week we'll hear something And I wonder how the American people are going to deal with this, you know the threat of AI. But I don't think there's an answer right now anyway. It's unpredictable I wouldn't place a bet on polymarket if I were you at this point. Oh well somebody lost a million on poolymarket when the World Cup because they bet that Spain would beat Cape Verde and it was it was a er zero score draw. It was a tie. Wow. Yeah. And yeah, so they're severely out of pocket. Wow. Dadn is terrible. Okay, hey, you know what? theseese companies these casinos, they don't get built by giving you money. It doesn't work unless unless they're owned by the former the president. but ye there are some people who can make a casino go bank.nder first spe thousand onn the draw or yeah, wnder how much whoo put a thousand on the draw? Who put the money on the draw? How much did they make? G and double check that. Yeah. Go check that out. I want to know. We'll find out in a minute. You're watching. This week in teech with Doc Rock from Honolulu, Lwen Thomas from San Francisco. He's the managing editor of the San Francisco. Biness Business Times And Ian Th Thomas, who is where Ian Thompson, rather, who is where? you were E I' in Brichmond, California, East Bose. Yes Richmond annex as they like to call themselves in a rather pretentious way. We are driving by the Chevron tanks down there and apparently Chevron's about to withdraw Well that they're shifting the headquarters but the refinery will always be there. Oh the the refinery. Well, I mean, I've just finished I've just become an accredited SERT member, commommun of Rponse team you're a member here And yeah, getting my hand license next month. Congratulations. And yeah, that was one of the scenarios they boughtght up. What if one of those tanks goes up? And it was just say Well, we'll do we can, but chances are most of the city's going to burn down Yeah It always interesting live in the shadow of a refinery. Somebody said that you almost said Nil Nil, and that would have cost you your US citizenship. He came so close, didn't he? James had wins. He checked himself. It zero zero. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. I love the Shopify. Have you ever thought of starting your own business, you know, You have a great idea. Those are easy to come by. But those pesky little details probably stopped you, How do you charge people Who's going to design the website? How Oh, here's a big one. I know Henry went through this with his salt hank. How do you handle fulfillment? I've been there. I've watched my own kids with they're starting their own business. But you know what? they got it done. And you know how they got it done with this. Shopify. I love Shopify. Shopify. Yes, when you go to St Hank, it's a Shopify. You see that Shopify pay button, Shop pay button there. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world from household names like Heinz and Matilda brands just getting started like boys, you know, Salt Hanks Salt Lovers Club. How about? Building the website I gott to tell you, Hank did not have the skills, but shopify helped him build a beautiful online store. And here's the thing it wasn't cookie cutter. It matched his brand's unique style You can see it yourself. It's beautiful. and they can do that for you too Shopify also helps with marketing. You can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And of course, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond Do not forget that iconic purple Shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify Today, sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shhopify. com slash twwit. goo to shhopify. com slash twwit shhopify d. com slash Twreat Love that sound Uh, let's see. We have not completely covered the AI thing, but I think we've done a pretty good job of it. You mentioned that open AI might be the beneficiary. Actually, this's interesting. I saw a study that said actually anthropic may actually be helped by the ban that sales data suggests that Uh becausecause I guess people go, wow, it's that good that the government had to ban it. It must be really good And as a result, Anthropics' existing models, the opS models, have been growing like topsy. According to Ramp, Anthropics's share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses. rose two and a half percentage points in May to forty one percent, finally beating openp AI, which had thirty nine point five percent of AI subscriptions in May. flat from the month. So anthropically the winner in May. Now remember this b happened just a couple of weeks ago, but There's, you know, marketing experts say this may be a good thing, a bad thing philanthropic. I think Fred's winning the PR rule the PR war, certainly. Every time they get banned they get more customers. Isn't that amazing? Yeah A peopleeople have heard about them. you know, every everyone's heard about Chat GPT, right? Exactly. Anthropic has always been kind of, you know, like an inside Silicon Valley software engineers, you know, love cloud code kind of, you know, secret vibe and, you know Open AI has been kind of the safe recognized choice and that's, you know, that's really changed. just sounds like your uncle. I mean, it's a great. I mean, I like the name because it's he rolls off the tongue. Claude just sounds like your uncle or your friend, which was on point, but when you're thinking of something that has like a tech name to it, right? We have all these something something metrics or something something Matics or I this or you know, whatever, Claude just It's a better name. I agree with. It is a glorious name It doesn't help for spreading The memifying of it, like turning it into a thing. right? Even even Gemini is very futistic. What do you think of Fable and mythos? I mean those those are better. L those are better. Fable. I don't know. it goes back to AOop. I don't know about that. but mythos Mythos I can get with That's sounds like you go snap your finger, you know, you got the Yeah. Infinity Stones. But it is. That's what they should name it. AI Infinity Stones. I am inevitable. Ed Zitrin, who is a notable AI critic and has for a long time been saying AI is spending so fast they can't possibly keep it up somehow got audited financial documents Iependently verified by the Fancial Times of open AIs revenue. And according to these documents, they lost thirty eight and a half billion dollars last year. And you have to be you have to be careful with those numbers because a lot of a lot like of the big chunk of that comes from their conversion from a nonprofit to a for profit Okay. it's complicated, but they had this very complex capped profit structure that allowed Microsoft and others to invest in them, even though they were a nonprofit. So you know, those R and D expenses that you see, a lot of that is actually like revaluating those those interests. Um that gets that eventually gets swept away by the the conversion to a for profit. The other thing that you've got to Keep in mind is is their stock expense, which is, you know it's not nothing, but it's a nodcash expense when they give stock options or other equity to employees This is why we have the business reporter on. Yeah. I mean, most likeike, you know, again, there's a lot of debate about it, but most Wall Street analysts when they're analyzing public companies, they kind of wave their hands about stock based compensation. Okay. And and Open AI did announce they now have a billion Monthly act users or is it weekly? I think weekly active users of Chat GPT. It's certainly achieved market share. And a couple of months ago, they made the largest raise of financing in history valuing the company eight hundred fifty two billion dollars. But Anthropic has just leapfrogged them with a higher valuation of almostars almost a neat trillion dollars, which as a as a privately held company, unprecedented. comp public this year, right? orr will they? Open AI what Sam Altman has said to employees is that Theyve they've filed confidentially to go public, which is kind of a preparatory step And they could go public within the year. They might stay private longer, he said, just because AI technology development is so fluid and there might be some benefits to staying private longer I'm a little skeptical of that. I'm not sure what those benefits are There are rules about when you have to go public. There are rules about that, right? The Jobs Act weakened those rules know or you know weakened those rules or gave companies more flexibility. You know Uh The old rules had to do with the number of shareholders, which was kind of a a function in forcing Facebook to go public back in the day. I remember these days in my head It's much easier to stay private for a long time. You know, as you can see, there's plenty of capital available today. As long as they can raise privately, it seems like it would be better to stay private. No, we just talk about SpaceX buying curursor though. And SpaceX is using that new public equity. That funny money as a, you know, as a, you know, it's you can call it funny money, but it's, you know, it's letting them do real deals. Well and it's also a stock based compensation is very valuable for getting the best engineering talent Right? If you have a public stock, it's a little easier to use that Absolutely, because you know, essentially you just keep issuing shares and diluting shareholders thenen you buy back shares if you have cash flow. Now that's a problem for these companies, but you know, as long as the As long as evaluation stays up didn't have to worry about that One of it's difficult believer Share buybacks by companies were actually illegal until the nineteen eighties and Reagan reformed the entire system. We could have solved them' doing a lot of work in that sense. I That' a reform Well no, I Intel spent billions buying back its own shares to support the share price and let chip manufacturing technology just lie useless and now they're paying the price for it. Yeah. So I worry that other companies like SpaceX androoppic OAI are going to fall into the same trap. you remember back then too, like you didn't have I mean, CEO salary caps was kind of a thing. You know, it wasn't this situation where a company who's losing money And yet their CEO is making more Right? Yeah And so the guys that do it the way Apple do it are, you know, Steve and Tim did, you know, like I'm going pay a dollar, but I'm going to make my money on whatever the stock makes Those guys all did really well. You know, they weren't as rich as or talked about as, but their companies tend to do well because they have a vested interest in making sure everything's moved forward Back when I always want to call him Randy Steve. when Randy Steve was running AT andT, AT andT was like scrubbing knuckles, but this dude was making forty eight million a year as a CEO like really killing the blue ball And Randall Stevenson. Yeah R R Steve. I was so mad at him back in the day. but until until they got rid of him, like you know, AT andT almost tanked and he was making more he was like one of the highest pac EOs at that time. So know a lot of stuff changed in eighty four, bro. Yeah's such a weird a weird number, but I feel like our entire economy took a weird turn and we thought everything was gravy until somebody snatched a. Jeff Attwood says that eighty four and all of those Reagan era Rules changes were what really powered the income income inequality explosion that we are seeing now. Yeah. I agree. Couldn't help you that. Couldn't help you that. Jeff. Jeff Bezos is closer in net worth to you and me than he is to Elon Musk. The second richest man in the world is closer in net worth to you and me than he is to Elon Musk. That's how much more Elon Musk is worth Okay, I need I need Owen's brain for a second sorry, by the way, it is funny money. so you can say everyone's a trillion dollars be my question El Elon Musk is better divorce lawyers. Okay. Somebody All right so that was not the question but Leo was closer. If we had to put a real thing when it like took a lot of the funny money out of it, what does it really mean? Like I tried to do it in my head the other day and I wasn't drunk enough You know' I'm not sure this is a very satisfying answer. But if you take the funny money out of it, none of this happens, right? The speculative investment that is fueling AI It just would not be possible without kind of our modern stock markets. And this you know the willingness by investors to just believe in whatever Elon Musk or Sam Altman is selling them. It's, you know, it's so powered by belief and story and narrative and hope. U soo. Yeah. ye. You know, it's like, well, you wouldn't you wouldn't have these kind of like wild, you know, wild inequitable outcomes, but you wouldn't have The upside either Um So, you know, it's really hard to see like any version of this that that doesn't happen without kind of the the modern miracle and the modern curse, know of public markets. Somebody somebody did the calculations, I wish I could remember, but for every dollar loss in the SpaceX value stock market value Elon loses something like one hundred fifty billion dollars. There's a huge, huge amount of swing. And he has a compensation That's crazy though. He's never gonna to see that compensation package because it requires a million people on Mars, among other things. Yes. Which honestly is never going to happen. It's notry everybody knows it's not gonna happen. Well We're not going a huge argument The one thing that blew my mind that story came out last week. I remember saying to a buddy I remember we were making fun of Elon Fr losing like forty four billion on Twitter. I'm sorry. Nothing. like he didn by the way, that was a good that was a good investment as it turned out Turned it out, right? Not for the revenue of X, but the for the power. it was a power move. Yeah You didn't know at the time it was a power move. I really don't They helped him. They're brillant like his president Yeah, frankly I mean, which he did from his heart Yeah, yeah I like that. Yeah. You know, it's funny, I'm really torn on Elon because I have so much respect for early Elon and and what his goals were and what he did And it's just later Elon that seems to be completely out of control. Among other things, he now predicts that by twenty thirty, SpaceX's revenue will be a trillion dollars a year. No Yeah, The S one was fascinating reading because he was like, well we need to get a self sustaining colony on Mars so we don't have all our eggs in one basket. Kind of annoyingly missing the fact that if you're born on Mars, you probably can't function on Earth because it's got one third of the gravity and you'd need an exaskeleton to actually walk around. You know this is all pie in the sky stuff. and it worked. He got his funny money. NSdDAQ changed their rules so that retail investors can get ripped off in my opinion, but you know, it's one of those things And we talk I honestly feel I feel like that people who buy SaceX stock are being sold a bill of goods that it's Yeah, it's just It's a meme stock When M is giving up Would Mars give us the best basketball players though? Yes. grosser c. It would be very easily injured. That would be the only downside. They'd be great basketball players in Mars gravity. Let's go to this. I'm glad you brought up Kelly and Zack's book because that is a must read for anyone. It's called The City on Mars Uh, and it I mean, I'll give you the TLDR Can we settle space? shouldhould we settle space? Have we really thought this through No No and no. The basically, it is completely impracticable and they list so many reasons why It's just not going to happen now. I think we should send robots to Mars. I think we should send AI to Mars because it could survive the flight Its eyeballs wouldn't explode Um, you know, I wouldn't have to worry about cosmic rays if we werere properly shielded. and wouldn't go crazy in the six month flight There's a lot of reasons why going to Mars is not a good idea. and I have to think Elon knows that unless he's really Hi as A did H Matt Damon famously said Fortune favors the brave. When he was doing an ad for FTX, that didn't go so well. That aed like milk. Yeah. Oh it was ble FTX commercials back in the day. It's super funny now and I see the people that were on it and I wasm like, o my go They all got sued, right? Dom Brady I think the court said no, they're not it was just an n. Come on, man. It was just an n. Yeah Andy Weir had a there was a wonderful interview with Andy Weir about the Martian. And he said the one thing, okay, two things which really stood out first off The initial premise, the windstorm that blows away the aerial can't happen on Mars. But also the other thing was getting in and out of space suits. Be if you try and do that in the ISS, it's a three hour process You know, and then he just slips into the saying, right, I'm going walkies now you Yeah Actually, I interviewed Andy and he said, there are only a couple of scientific inaccuracies in this book that storm on Mars was one of them. However, Oen AI did make a big hiring move this week. two years ago, Google paid It is said two point seven billion dollars to hire Nom Shazir Nobel prize winner He who was the architect of Google's Gemini models, wrote the original Transformer paper twoo point seven billion dollars along with his team of researchers for character AI A big aqua highire Two years later, he has now moved on And he's going to open AI, which is considered a huge acquisition for openp AI Big win. And I think a big loss for Google. He wrote the famous paperttention is all you need that introduced the Trformer architecture. And by the way, that's what GPT stands for as general general Purpose transr Purpose T transformer So, you know, you have to think if he got two point seven billion from Google two years ago, what the hell did open AI offer him F daughter's fan in marriage, maybe? you know? Yeah mayaybe ye, you could marry S same Alman's daughter. I don't know And I believe all of Anthrop' co founders are still there, which is kind of their their claim to fame. all of the other AI companies. I mean, you know like like open AI is, you know, won this round, but they've, you know, they they've lost people to, you know to Apple to meteta you know XAI has been bleeding people. That's a big reason why they're Why they're buying C curursor is because, you know, basically, They've lost a lot of their, you know, their technical co founders and um and they need to kind of restock the talent And you know, I think we're going to see a lot more comings and goings, especially as these companies go public and some of the early hires cash out and you know, others are attracted by the public equity payouts that theseese companies can now kind Yeah goingoing publical is certainly I mean, that's what we're saying. That's one of the reasons why you go public so that you can And a lot of these guys taking their their they're taking their payouts and they're, you know, going elsewhere, right? Like it's kind of a smart move, especially if you live in the bay. like I want to make sure that I you know, finish paying off this house and do a couple of other things You can move to Liechtenstein. You can completely move like mean there's guys now who can cash cursor move and like just step away from the game and they're squared away for quite a while, you know Don't I mean, usually there are lock inss for the founders and the people that get acquired, right of typically I think three years. You want to be the out manager where like you can just take, you can leave this right away. You don't have. Take your stock and get out of here. see. I'm going to leak. You'reing very quiet on this because a friend of mine is a co founder of Anthropic and a former registered journalist So I can't say anything about it, but yes, you're right. a happy man. I do wish I w one thing I wish anthropy would do better and I wish more people understood the difference between HRF models and constitutional models. I think the reason why I went heavier on Claude than open AI. it's not just even the crazy stuff that goes on in open AI. I never even touch crock. I'm mad that they took the name. I used to always say, Oh if people could grock this better, this could be. Oh I know. I'm glad that they stole one of my favorite words, which I stole from Christina Warren. She stole from what's pace it Robert Heinlin. Yeah from R Yeahah. course But like you don't just take a good word and ruin it, dang it. Anyway, I wish more people really did understand the way constitutional models work as opposed to, you know, sort of human reinforcement. And I think that would go a long way to help even just, you know, this this over AI hate that's going down right now. A whole lot of it has to do with, you know, fear of losing jobs for is really weird. The thing that we use to elect certain people by telling them that other people are going to take your jobs And then well that's not working with smart people because they know better. So let's just scare them into thinking that AI is going to take their jobs And I'm like, yo, people will always need human connection. So there's certain jobs that are never going to be taken You know, it's really weird. massage therapists. Yeah, think cl to fix this n Acupuncturists. I guess you could have robots do that I don't know if I trust that. Plumbers. Plumbers, you're not gonna to have a robot plumbers. Yeah plumbers. Have you ever seen a robot's butt crack underneath your sink? No, you don't want to. You don't want. And on that note, we're going take a break. Sorry Rc. I think we have a show title though. Thank you, Doc. Rob direct roack. Yeah. roobot buttcrack I was gonna call it limpets and barnacles, but now I've got robot buttcrack. I don't know if you're put sounds like a good band, dude. It would be. Would it be a punk band or would it be heavy metal? What kind of? I think we gotta do eighties yacht rock, bro. Yacht rock. So it's so opposite of what it actually is, right? We get some Chris Christopfferson robot buttcrack come takeake me away to my roobot butt crack second That's Doc Rock. He is the director of Strategic Partnerships at ECAM, which by the way, we are using right now And we love Thank you Doc Rock appreciate. And of course you'll find them on YouTube and apparently a fan of the Japanese national team. Is that who you're rooting for in the World Cup? Actually no, one hundred percent money is on Holland as it always is. They sure looked good too good win yet. I mean, like the game played as it is played. that way you put an orange muff on your normally purl dude, I'm normally holling is my squad through and through I first fell in love with the game for watching, I didn't know at the time. Johann Cuifff andpeele play at RFK Stadium when he had the diplomats vers Cosmos I had no idea what I was watching at the time, but as I got older and I realized I saw history bro. I saw Joh and Pelee play each other. Wow. I've been in love with Dutch National team ever since then. That was like back when there was eights and for the years. So yeah And some of the best fans in the business as well, they really enjoy themselves. hundred percent. Well, the Scots give them a run for their money. No, the Scots definitely give them a run for the money, but with for one color of insanity. Oh yeah, the Max Verstappen fans are very much No no, I mean, a friend of mine went to the last Dutch Grand Prix and he said Seriously, if you get the chance, go there, camp out, the parties are absolutely epic. That's the way It's right on the ocean right? It's a standardaing on threads, bro. The Maxis came after me, bro and like, o, they're like, but you're Ameran. You you can't know anything about F one. I'm like, you're five, so go away I know you are. What am I? That's Ian Thomas, who Thompson, I keep calling you Ian Thomas. I don't know why. Maybe because it of fish muffins, I think, but I don't know It's my fault. He's my favorite English muffin. You're Owen Thomas, managing editor of the San Francisco B businessus times. He's Ian Tom's son I don't know why we do this. We put you together all the time. It's just I think Benito does it to confuse me. Anyway. No, I don't know. it's quite honest. So tell your friend at Anthropic, I love Claude. I was very upset when Fabable got turned off I was right in the middle of a session And all of a sudden, you can't use this model anymore And I thought it was my credit card. I thought, o Gosh, darn it I was rewriting the whole Twit ad sales system Oh Grive. No I mean, honestly Claude for software is pretty good. I'm a fan of that. When I have an issue, I go to Cloud. I go to Cloud Code. Yeah, it's good. They do a good job. Good to have all three of you here. This episode today, brought to you by simply CX. What separates the tech companies winning right now from the ones falling behind. It's not just the product, it's the experience And you already know that gap is only getting wider. That's exactly what these simply CX podcast was built to explore launched B Microsoft and hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experperience leader, Simply CX brings you real no fluff conversations with leaders from companies like Carmax, TD Bank, and TMobile on how AI, data, and design are reshaping customers expect and demand. If you need a place to start, check out their Recent episode with Neil Iverson TTech digital about how AI tools like context gathering and call summarization are changing the way customer support teams operate behind the scenes. You'll appreciate how simply CX goes beyond the headlines and gets into how AI is actually being implemented inside large organizations today. and what's realistically working For example, an airline contact center transformation was able to reduce average handle time by thirty percent. While improving the experience for both agents and travelers whichich is timely given this summer travel season, right? New episodes drop every other Tuesday Find simply CX wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to tell him I sent you Simply CX Customer experience. It's all about the customer experience. And incidentally it is the first day besides being the first day of summer, the longest day of the year in the Northern heemisphere It is also Father's Day, at least in the United States. I don't think arere you a father dooc, Rock? I don't remember . No got no fathers except me on here today. Yeah, I like expensive things and traveling. You know what? you're smart. I love my kids. It was fun. Henry called me this morning, and then Abby called in the middle of the call so I conferenced them in and I got to talk to both kids at the same time and it felt really good But now theys can now take care of you if he keeps slinging. Well, that's right. They're now in their thirties. they're full grown adults And so they're not really my kids anymore. They've gone out into the world er was fun come on. the story, Leo is that, you know, in old days, right, salt was all about money, right? Where we get salary and all that for. Yeah, that's right. Yall, Hank just took it full circle. It's like, you know, kids are into bringing stuff back into the analog phase now. There's this like whole thing about vinyl and analog cameras and retro games. So he's like, y'ma make salt Money again. He makes he cooks It's interesting because he's done very well that I was going to ask because he done an in out burger yes because I get a craving and I went for one yesterday. but'm curious to see if he's done an in and out. You know what his latest thing, I hope I'm not giving something away because he hasn't released it yet But he's trying to learn to make what is that amazing Japanese omelet that's just Oh Ohmarise Dude. I can do that. I can show him how to he's trying to he's So he's shooting So every morning he's making omarise And he's recording the efforts as he gets better and better. Yeah to And then he hopes you'll have at the end, here's, you know, how I learned how to do umorise. So that's you to do it. Re actually the shape of the pan, right? Regular American sccout pan is what work. Its dor. You need a square one, right? Yeah No, go on Amazon and buy him the one from Motokichi Who's the guy who's made it famous, you know, the sort of clown looking dude with the red hat. You can buy Multa Gi special pot. If you can't find it, I'll find you a link M LT o MO T O K I T C Hi Motokichi. And it's the shape of the frying pan. If you use like an eight inch normal chef omelet pan, it won't work. It has a little extra roundness to it. But getting that flip over perfectly is the thing and it has to have that right structure inside He's probably the better position because you want to use farm fresh eggs, like storeboard eggs or just trash nowadays So if I can't find it on Amazon, Oh, maybe it's this. I'll find It's a square pan. It doesn't say motor. you don't want the square the square pans is for making tamagu y Yaki. That's a little bit different. Of you're in Pataluma, Leo. you must have access to good eggs surely. I mean, Oh yeah, but lots of Unfortunately, Henry's in Manhattan. I don't know what the egg situation. Yeah, he got to get the the upstate joint. Yeah, he has to come home to make his Ootokichi, Tamayaki, Omasaki, Kakasaki waki. What is it called? Omo Kichi ototo Kiti, he's this famous guy His place is in Kyoto and if you try to go to his restaurant, like you have to book almost like eight months in advance. And we were in Kyoto a couple of Christmas ago and I just happened to be walking down the alleyway and I look in the window and it was right by his restaurant And he just popped in the window. he's like, you know, he's come on in, do P Yeah. No, we couldn't get in. You can't I've been trying. I go to children every Christmas, I've been trying to get in, stillill can't get in Like, but it's kind of incredible. But there's lots of Ood. you don't have to go to that one Oh, here it is Fr Kyota Japan, the ultimate omeletan looks just like a regular omelet pan. Yes, the guy does. Yes. Yeah. It looks like it's just a round omelet. slightly rounded at the bottom and you want to find that. If you can get your hands on one of those, that I help you. This is an indie Go. And look, they raised two point two million yen, which sounds like a lot of money. It's not It's not. There he is. he's so cute. Ki ki. Yeah, he's a nice dude watch his videos. his videos are absolutely hilarious. He's adorable. He's a redhead. He's like Ronal McDonald in Japan. I am gonna send this right now to Henry and say, this is what you need Yeah, you know, it wasn't about money for him, although It's turned out to be he's done very well. He said the couple months ago, he said, I'm richer than your dad. He said, That's how it's supposed to work out. That's the goal in life. So happappy Father's Day to all the fathers If you did a good job, your kids are doing better than you did. That's the If you can't find it before December, let me know I'll bring you one back. Oh. I go every December. Gotta get away from this place. Christmas in Osaka. Yeah, actually this time I'll do Kobe and Kyoto But ko osaka like this. kind of. Now Christmas in Japan, do you do the Kentucky fried chicken thing because apparently that's huge over there. Absolute freaking looly is way better than ours. Absolute freaking looly. Oh my gos. You're the one who taught me that you take a leftover Kentucky fried chicken drumstick and you put that in your rice cooker Yes. Yeah withith the rice, of course. Good. And it makes it. I have to now I have to go to Kentucky fried chicken to get one though. Can I use popeyes instead? I use any fried chicken from anywhere. Any fried chicken. Whatever fried chicken that you get left overver, even if it's the one from like what do he called the The market saf wayay, E the one from saf. Even the safeay one. Yeah. J right. You just take leftover pieces of chickens and then even nuggets, I do. like I go to if I get Rick Ross, AKA Wing stop, I'll put like four or five of those nuggets with the rice. J game over You have learned so much on this show, boys and girls. I glad you aren't you glad you too This weend Docs cooking. Docs cooking. Google speaking of Google Uh you win some, you lose some in this case, They lost. They fought though and I'm proud of them After the Republican national committee and Democratic Party headquarters, they found remember, they found pipe bombs planted there after the Capitol riot And in the investigation, The U. S. Department of Justice, this is in twenty twenty three in the Biden administration, went to Google with a search warrant asking for this was just unsealed, just now, asking for all the people who had searched for thingsings like pipe bombs A. political, you know, things, that kind of thing They wanted what would have been hundreds of search results I guess they were it's it called a reverse warrant. O there's another one called the Geofence warrant, which is right now in front of the U. S. Supreme Court. There's a constitutional challenge against this. Google announced that in twenty twenty three it would no longer have access to users' locations histories so they couldn't comply with Geofence I don't know, is that true Anyway, Google tried to fight this. They went to court because they consider this an invasion of their users's privacy. So I want to give them some credit for fighting this. keyword based warrants. are a new area of U. S. law And the courts ruled against Google Courts said, no, you've gott to give the Department of Justice That information. Google received geofence and keyword based warrants in the pipe bomb investigation according to the records just now unsealed It produced data about users in the vicinity of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee buildings in Washington The company also was forced to comply with a warrant for users who searched for locations of the headquarters or the committee names Paired with the words like security, camera, bomb, and explosive The data was anonymized, however, so Google didn't reveal names or other personal information By the summer of twenty twenty one, the company complied with the government's initial request to identify more than two hundred and fifty users whose searches included references to bombs or if users repeatedly looked up the RNC or DNC. Two years later, the government went back to Google with a warrant to identify more than three hundred users who did a single search about either committee. So they complied, Google complied at first, this is all from Bloomberg. But when it came down to, we want everybody who did this one search Google protested that now you've gone too far. The potential harm, Google lawyers argued, the individual harm to potentially thousands of innocent users. wrought by the government's invasion into their anonymous political activities and associations renders the search unreasonable. And I have to say, That sounds right. Yeah Government lawyers countered that Google couldn't vicariously assert the rights of its users against unconstitutional searches Well I mean, this really brought up to mind that don't even know about it. How can they protest? Go ahead, Ian. This kind of brought to mind, Do you remember the Apple case in twenty sixteen where the terrorists The San Bernino whatever. Yeah, the San Bernardino case. and Apple was said you know we're told by the government, give us a back door to your operating system. They said no, Google was perfectly right to fight this in my opinion. It's a drastic overreach and very, very bad for privacy Yeah It's so dumb not to realize that First of all, the amount of data you'd have to comb through because when somebody hears something, people go and search it. That doesn't mean you're into it, right? Well, that's the issue is is this I mean, this seems so unreasonable. You're right. And so what just open that n ninetyine percent of those searches are innocent. In fact all but one And then once you open that door, you can easily chain a whole bunch of stuff together Right? if you had a thing where you know, one of your friends was visiting your house and you know, she's female or whatever, but she brings a bunch of other friends with her and you're like, okay, I'm just finishing up in the bathroom. I'll be out in a second. Entertertain yourselves. And you come out of the freaking bathroom, hair is wet. you're like doing one of these At leisa walked in nine times out of ten, you knocked out, Dg. you didn't even do nothing, but you're done. I se her. So like that's the kind of thing that's dumb about this is you can't just say, oh, somebody searched this so they must be in on it too. Like that's just crazy. So So by the way, I'll give credit to Zoe Tillman, who is the law reporter for a Bloomberg on this story. So Google did comply initially But that final Bad Warrant went too far in twenty twenty three, Google fought it It sat in limbo for a year. In twenty twenty four, a federal magistrate denied Google's request Google then challenged it. they appealed it to the U.S District Chief Judge James Boseberg, whose name you may. Remember, he's been very active lately in a number of high tech high profile cases. In february twenty twenty five, he concluded the magistrate got it right. ordered data from Google. By the way, they did make an arrest I don't but unfortunately we don't know if the arrest was the evidence was based on what they found from Google That's not revealed in the arrest. It just seems like an enormous lose though, from an investigative position because if you have to go through three hundred, four hundred people who actually search for these terms, you know, you might get the actual perpetrator, but you're going have to spend a hell of a long time going through useless information. Yeah, it's a lot of fish in that net. I mean, that's where AI comes in, right AI makes did him Diving through all this information, linking things up much easier in theory, at least. Yeah. And I imagine that well I don't know, but I think one of the things You could say they may would take that data. Okaykay, now we have three hundred people and cross reference it against other information that they had that might have had ten suspects. and then if they get a match there, now they're narrowing it down instead of just going through all three hundred saying Well, let's interview each of them. And it could increase these kind of maximalist demands for data because you know, now if it is pllausible that they can, you know process it. They can persuade a judge perhaps that, you know hey this, this data would actually have benefits So now our freedom is based on chat GPT. We're all screwed. What could possibly go wrong? Well nowadays, if the person is smart, like I'm not giving you any instructions, criminals. But if you're using something like perplexity or you know, even the search built into your various chat bots 's not your search. That search goes from a couple of servers as well. even be able to spin it back. Yeah. although and this is something we've been talking a lot about lately, it's become more and more obvious to me. that all of the AI companies, including Perplexity, keep logs of everything that happens. How And in fact are collecting huge amounts of information because not only are they collecting your name and your search, but they're correlating it to other things, let's say you give perplexity your tax return and say, did I calculate this right? They have a lot of information And all the evidence is that they're saving it I had to Ecept Ithropic, thirty days. Well no, that's only for fable if I can't remember. that was another fascinating. peopleeople were very upset about that. But yeah, when you use these chatbots In fact, I think it's when you use AI in general, they collect a huge amount of information. all the information When you use the internet in general, they. Thank you. I was going to say web trackers. Yes. I told my. The difference is so if I'm doing a Google search, I type it in a search result. so they now have your IP address and your search result Yeah If you're using AI, a lot of times you're prompting it and sending it documents and sending it other information, you're giving it much more than just a search term Okay, but here's's here's what Benny means, right? I'm looking at the daily news, right? Do we call you Benny, Benito? Is that is that?'s it's my old Filipino thing. I think I think Benny probably doesn't mind, but I'm not going gonna don't worry, Benito, I won't call you Benny. L L at this with Bad Bunny in play as the number one dude on the planet right now it's a good it's a good name. It's a nice match I'm looking at the L.A Times on Brave right now. It says forty three trackers on this site alone. J reading G point article. right? Good point. And that's just on a regular newspaper. Today, something crazy innocous. I want you to try this just in case me. anyybody who's using brave. I went to cVS d. com And I went to go order some Vaseline lip do hickeys, right? The plane suckers like this. When I went to go type it in because Brave blocks something under sight all it did was go into a reload loop and it would not stop. You can't click anything So that goes to tell you how much information, why I use Brave and ghostry and things like that. It goes to show you how much information we put outute day. And so all of these guys in the chat, they know we're all nerds. But when people are like, I'm worried about my privacy. And I'm like, B, what do you use to block things on the web Nick I just use Microsoft Edge or I just use It's not clear that you can do this from the AI chat bs though, right? Those are not You know, you don't you're not You Well this is why I use Tour, you know? I mean, it's Tour and duck duck go. Yeah's the way forward. There is an excellent EFF has an excellent page called Cver Your trracks where you can put your browser through a little check to see if your browser fingerprinting. See, it used to be cookies. That's so old school. They don't use cookies anymore. Now they use, as you said, Doc, they use a variety of information that they get from your ferouse printers as the most fingerprintters Th things like don't know how to what ext extensions installing the stuff And so I just did this in my Zen browser And yes, it's blocking ads. Yes, it's blocking trackers, but look at this Is it protecting me from fingerprint? No, your browser has a unique fingerprint That's not good That meino. Any site that does fingerprinting knows it's me exactly, knows exactly who this is. And one of the bigger things that nobody really talks about, let's just say all four of us are just super, super good, right? We keep everything down. We got it all tight, no problems there But one of our friends in a friend group is loose with their stuff. All of our information is on their computer. Right. And so you remember when us Mac users always had the one PC friend and you would get the thing from their using outlook. com And you would get these weird spams. And you know it's not from them, but it's their address, but they don't even speak in the right way that that person speaks. Like there's no New England accent in this email And it's because their mail was sending mail to everybody.. And you know, it was normally dumb PowerPoint slides, but that was the beginning of getting your name onto these list that, you know, I'm using in Ccogny or to try to get rid of We got fish Euse me. We got fish back in January becausecause a client that we've done regular business with got hacked and they sent an email to us from his address The kind of email he always sends asking for a request for a proposal And it looked, I mean for it was it was the same email we get from this guy all the time, right because the people once they hacked him, looked at his emails, looked who they sent them to and made it look the same. And it had a link that you click to a document on Google Drive. And fortunately here in the house, I have some filtering going on. So when we clicked it here It just spun, right? Right. Unfortunately, we sent it to an employee who does not have the same protections. It didn't spin. It popped up what looked like a Google login which The employee then went through and filled out, including the two factor authentication, it was a man in the middle. the guy in the middle got all of that, passed it on to Google so that the interaction continued apparently normally, but kept it and immediately used it to log into our Google Wspace. The funny thing is it must work so well. They apparently got so much success with this. They didn't bother using their access for a few months. They looked at a couple of emails and then wandered off And Google finally noticed it three months later, one hundred and twenty one days after this phishing attack. G grief. We got to notice from Google that your workspace has been compromised But but you know, all the forensics tell us that nothing happened because I think they probably have a stack of thousands. they're just working their way through them and we were, you know, they didn't get around to us So we're very lucky But that's exactly why this privacy is so important. Yes, you know, it's just it's an issue. It's getting worse. And I understand why to be honest, the Trump administration would be scared of fable because you put a tool like that in the hands of these bad actors God knows what could happen. But it's funny that the people who say that stuff the most, when you check them on it for real, for real, they're the most laaxed about the security on other things that they don't realize that they give up on the. They use. They use a signal client that's not really signal that records everything Yeah to the hard drive. It happens easily actck. It's so easy. Nobody would do that. I hate the term virtual signal. It's so overly played, but it is in a way easy to virtual signal that you're trying to do all these things and it's like, but no, but you Well, that's why I admit That's why I am admitting now to us getting fished, right? Yeah. because I think it's important to hear people say, no, no, this happens and it happens to people who are very careful We have a lot of security And it still happens. And it still happens. Here's a funny one. and I wouldn't say somebody in the chair brought this up a while ago, but it's funny because it makes sense. We get so much information now about the administration and their their AI stance, right What does Du post on his social platform basically every day? weird AI pictures of him being a? O riding a horse. I was a doctor That's I'm like no, no It was like doctor to photograph. Oh yeah, I'm a doctor. That's it. I'm like listen again, listen to you like we want to be the anti AI. you know, needs to slow down, you know, they're crushing on us And then yeah, dude as I heard posting AI crap on a daily basis. You know where I bet Tams of former former opponents doing weird stuff. You know where I bet sales of VPN is going through the roof right now? in the United Kingdom No Yeah, okay Okay I'm looking at you Iian. I'm getting ready for a rance on this one. not as stupid as he. So Kirstarmer, the prrime Minister of the UK, has announced the lastou last wee moment Yeah, well, he may not be P prime Minister tomorrow and the polymarket nting is apparently that he will resign tomorrow Yeah, I mean, it's had to come. He has a personality vacuum. He's done very little despite being given a huge majority. Soly did lastast week is announced that at the by the end of the year, the UK will prohibit under sixteenens from using YouTube Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok. They still can use WhatsApp. and Facebook messenger, but they're banned. And how are they going to enforce this? This is the problem. Well you know's interesting. the only way to enforce it would be to require everyone using those services, adult or not to actually log in and provide a government issued ID in order to use social media, which is a prvacy nightmare. They're not going to stop kids from using this stuff. It's one of those ridiculous. I mean, Australia has gone down the same route. That's by the way, what everybody's saying, it works so well in Australia that we're going to do it It doesn't work in Australia. I've got friends down there and their kids are still using social media platforms. You know,ember VPN sales went through the roof in Australia when they implemented that last. Oh ye. Yeah. Yeah. And the same will happen in the UK as it did when they were talking about a porn ban Um and honestly, I'm iffy about the utility of VPNs because basically you're just handing the traffic to a single company rather than a bunch of them This is totally unenforceable Yes, it would be wonderful if teenagers weren't on social media, because I think it's very bad for their mental health. But at the same time, bad for Just same way, it's bad for grown upp mental health too, I should. Well, true, true. It's bad for all of our mental health. let's face it Yeah, it is highly addictive, by the way I was I went to see a Bob Dylan concert last Saturday at the Oh, you went to the Greek Theater? I did Ohice. How was Berley Well it was interesting. Look, I'm a Bob Dylan fan. Last time I saw him was fifty years ago in nineteen seventy six, when I was nineteen years old So I thought it was really cool to see him fifty years later. I don't know. I haven't aged at all, but he has quite a bit. He's eighty five. and he kind of sat in the back of the stage behind a piano. I mean, it's wonderful to hear him. hisis voice is still there and his songwriting is still there and no one one of best storytellers in a game. Yeah, no one expresses the meaning of his lyrics It's just brillant. However, I'm glad his voice is still going through order and their voices do not carry well after. Well, I mean there was He never had a great voice. so maybe that's why, right? He just helps He still sounds like this. he sounded like he was eighty five when he was twenty. so maybe that's why he doesn't sound No, I was thrilled to see him But I think it was at his behest because it is not the normal policy of the Greek theatater. There are signs everywhere that says, do not take your phone out of your pocket. If you use your phone, you will be ejected And at the beginning, I loved this. It said we I think this is a Bob Dylan thing. We would like you to be present for this concert. have not looking through this concert through a screen and not forcing your people behind you to look through your screen. So we're asking that you not use your phones at all this concert. Now I know there's some comics, Dave Chappelle will make you give up your phone at the door You know, But so they didn't do that, but they were strict. But here's the interesting thing. it really frosted the audience. and people were sneaking their phones like crazy. They could especially there were three acts. so in between and there was for all three acts, it was the whole show In between acts, people are going like this peopleeople cannot go an hour without looking at their phone. I have to say, I can understand that. I was publicly shamed by Steven Merrit of the magnetic fields when we went to his last concert because I was just just as he was starting off, I just tweeted a picture of him and he stopped and went, There's someone in the front row using their phone. just like, Oh shit, that's me, R? What is he looking at Twitter? he hits me backstage watching? No, no, he face. Yeah, you see on your faceook your head likeike I You know, I have to say after the fact I thought, you know what? That's right. Let's be present for this and not experiencing it through, you know creating FomMo in our friends and things. And how many times you go to a concert? guy's singing his heart out on the stage and people are turning around with their back to the guy taking a selfie to show that they were at the concert. I would be so incensed if I wereike if you want to show me that you went to a concert, do me a favor and just take a picture of your tickets after, not before after don't Not before because it can st. That's it. Like that should be the thing we should start because I also don't like it When someone's sitting there like recording the whole thing, because, you know, sometimes what are you Who's gonna to watch that video? Well, first of all, watch it it's not the whole thing, but the hard part is like I want to know like what songs they're going to sing, right? I want to know that they bring out the good ones or you know, what what special ones we forgot about that they pulled out or whatever. And so when you you're kind of giving it away Right? Like you're kind of give away. I wonder what the set's going to look like because I'm in I'm in lighting in sound. Like I want to know how they rigged up the flyers the whole nine yards. Like let me see that when I get there. Don't spoil Christmas. This is why I don't like iPhone leakers. missed Leo, we had this conversation a thousand times I missed the days of waking up on announcement day and being o, now we' just looking for that one thing that leaks haven't already leaked. You know, and nobody comes back and says we got it wrong. They go, Oh, well, we're disappointed because they didn't play this or we're disappointing. Absolutely. Although they I miss Dylan Website publishes the set list each time So you't do it though? I mean at least it might be hard to stick to it. No, no, he changes. It is right It's also to warn people he's not going to sing the hits.t. It is not a Bob Dylan cover band. it's Bob Dylan. rightight? with you dooc on this because we went to see Orbital at the Warfield And there was one bloke in the very front row who recorded the entire concert on an iPad of all things and didn't dance at all. and you're kind of like What the hell are you thinking? I see that a lot at the local shows where people there are people dancing 'cause we go to shows with, you know mosh pits so you can really enjoy yourself. But there's always in the front Two or three guys who don't really look like they're enjoying it, just recording it like that's what they do. Yeah, that, dude, get out of here. G away. Absolutely Anyway, back to the UK. the UK. I think that I think kids can probably do without social media. My question is, what about YouTube? YouTube is such an instruction. I think that's medium. Yeah. a huge problem. And YouTube is on social media T be honest It quQasi, right? You know, there's commenting, there's, you know, I think it's horrible to ban YouTube. M it Oh yeah, I mean, can't have a social abute gold mine It's like banning TV. Well, we decided, and you know what? they could have. B in my day, everybody agreed. Newton Minnow, the chairman of the FCC, testified to Congress that television is a vast wasteland tried to ban it. Remember Mr. Rogers? That name by the way for a M M. Mr. Rogers, in fact, go see it. It's on YouTube. you ever hear that? testified in Congress and saved PBS by talking about how important it was for the kids who watched Mr. Rogers's neighborhood and other shows How important that was, he saved public television so I could easily see that same mentality showing up here. Well, you know, it's bad something we didn't have as a kid, so they don't need it. Anyway, why are these changes being made? The UK government says, well That's what you want. nine out of ten parents backed to social media bann for under sixteen, two thirds of young people agreed. What's Do doing it the wrong way round though. I mean, honestly, if you're going to try and cut this off, first off, don't allow kids to use their phone at school. That's the absolute great starting point. Yep. I agree with that one. Yeah. But in terms of the security aspect of this If you've actually got to log in using a government registered ID, that's going to make a security goldmine for somebody who wants to break into the companies that are running these things. It's incredibly harmful and it just won't work All kids will do is use burner phones and probably steal their parents' driver's licenses and you know go on that It's just who would just let it happen anyway So ye yeah, that would work. Explain this to me G explain kiss the governments The answer is forty two, Leo. It It says So here in this section, this is the UK's the government's own website, fact sheet, newew rules to protect children online Who will it affect Children and young people under sixteen? Crucially They will still be able to access the online world safely for learning news, games and staying in touch with known friends and family on messaging services Mm Are they asserting that the messaging services are all you I don't understand what How L What are they talking about? L? This is the problem when you get government writing te technology law because they don't understand used AI to write this. Before we got social media, right? the number one thing you saw on TV about Chris Hansen famously was creepers talking to kids on AOL and prodigy and computerve chat bots. Well, Chris wasn't that far back, but the very first bad thing I ever heard about, youang coming to get to was stranger danger through people anonymously talking to people on BBSs Yeah. Well, that the fil warar games, yes Yes. Like, oh my Godd, like come on people They can talk to people and missing. That's never worked. And just recently, one of our Hong police officers was acting as like a fourteen year old boy and busted some high monkey mukks over here, you know, from chatting So what? H' heres here's more. Will adults need to prove their age Many adults won't need to do checks because they've already got an account that has been open for more than sixteen years. So that's Okay WellL. Or has a credit card connected to it. I can kids under sixteen not get credit cards? No. But you could your parents' credit card could be connected to your account Oh yeah, somebody's wallet's gonna to get fininched and they can just they can do it that way. Or it's linked to an email address that's age verified in other ways. I don't even know what that means. honestly, that one baffled me too because I don't know that many email accounts which require age verification. Iever seen one Some adults will already have done age verification under the existing Online Sfety Act, so wouldn't need to do it again And if not, well This could be as simple as a facial recognition check for over eight teens. In twenty seven, is that why we have the new age verification here now? because when I installed twenty seven, it gave me some speech about I didn't read it, of course, because I'm old, but Yeah Yeah. So Apple here ping this actually. let's take a break. and I do want to talk about this because Meta is lobbying Congress They're actually supporting the new COSA bill But one of the things they like about it is that they wouldn't be responsible for age checks. Apple would or Google would, the gatekeepers, the online, the app stores would be. And Apple is actually, I think, trying to set that up now get ahead of regulation, but let's take a break and then we can't talk about that. I'd like to talk about that. You're watching this week in teech with Ian Thomas from the loveovely M. God D it. I blame you, Benita. call Emma Thompson. Let's goan Oh E And Doc. Ian Thompson who by the way, does a wonderful newsletter. And it used to be called Letter from America until Alistter Yes, we were Alister Cook, we were cook. That's it. We got we got slight it's called view from the Valley, but yeah I like that Dude I like Alistair Cook, just the name. H. Yeah. He used to do. So he used to do this wonderful letter from America. And you called Letter from America and honored to honor him No, I honor him completely. But yes, it was If you go to teinitative. com you can subscribe to Ian's Wonderful newsletter view from the valley. The shotly backome a bat A actuallyually o Oh you got Yeah, I'm gonna I'm trying to start a podcast, but I've got to say some of the software out there is a real bug. Ian, listen. Yeah me, We're about to fight, bro. I can fix you. There's a software. it's called ECam. Turns out Twit Network was a really nice podcast network You could do the whole thing by yourself. But he doesn't want to do video. Don't have to do video. Oh, he came' al. see, that's confusing about the name then. Yeah, which is why we took live out. We took live out. But it doesn't require a camera. No, no, no. And I would tell you I would tell you record it with the video on and just strip the video because it is something easier about doing it when you can see when you go to edit When you go to edit R see when you edit. And then at the end you just output the audio only and send it. You don't have to do video, but just yeah, send me an email. Oh eCM with two Ms, right? Yeah. Yes. And one I'll invite you. I just got into something that's brand new called Rebel Audio. I don't know if any of you have heard of this But this is a highly AI driven podcast network. You still do the audio show, but but AI then can do all the other stuff, which is kind of cool. I was going to say, I really don't want to do video because I've got a face for radio. No I think not. Yeah. I don't tellell you why you want to do video right now. I'm sorry Let sideetrack you real quick The numbers on YouTube for you're watching on television It's actually astonomical and now Really? YouTube has surpassed Apple and Spotify combined as a distribution network So interesteresting. with over last year reported over a billion hours of podcast alone on television. Okay. so Ian, your audience looks like us, right you know, well, me, I'm the youngest at sixty, but artest looks like us. And what happens is what we do is we put like I put Leo on Macbak weekly, I put it on in the living room. It's on the' just listening. Yeah. But I'm just listening, but I'm walking around And if it just so happens that Andy says, Hey, buy one of this, I'll come into the living room and see these numbers like this. Yeah And then I you know what I'm doing. So I'm working a three D printer, I'm doing something else. But those numbers from YouTube That's right. It's true. Astronomical. And you being a researcher that you are Go look those up before you say not to do video because doing what you're doing right now is sitting in front of your books, just sitting there talking.s eas. You already have everything. You don't even have to look at the camera. It could just beat the side of your face and you're still talking. But what you don't want to do is put your podcast on YouTube with just a picture. That doesn't work People go e Okay. And people want to interact with the person because again, we lack the human activity. We lacking all this AI generated crap So the idea of live streaming your recording, which I don't know where you would get that idea from, Leo, and then taking the edited version and publishing it on audio That is the Blletproof way to do a really successful podcast right now Excellent. Thank you very much. Don't edit, don't over edit, don't do anything crazy. L and I can totally set you up just because you're friends of the network. And whatever you do, don't be a cat because Oh God. Or is a fox That's a fox I was that's a fox, surely. What does a fox say Whatever you do, don't be a cat. There we go. sorry, I clicked on the wrong animal. Yeah Beause that nobody wants that. Actually you could do that, Ian. and then Well did you ever see the famous clip of the lawyer who how yourour Honorilter I am not a cat Yes. I know speking of animals Fitz, the Wonder Dog is fussing at me. Well, we'll let Fitz go because I have to do, wait a minute, this is wrong. I have to do a commercial and I better fix this before I do the commercial. It would be terrible. It would be kind of ironic, wouldn't it? All of a sudden? 'causeuse we have to send these out. I can I think, oh, that's what you should do, Ean. Go with a mustache Oh, no. That mage was terrible because every time you took everyvery time you took a swigger E time you took a swigger What's wrong it?? That's a It look like wrong Jeremy when I had that mustard. That's why we loved there. That's why we loved it. All right, now I will do a commercial. You go Walk the Dog or whatever it is you need to do.. You're watching this week in tech. withith Owen Thomas, Ian Thompson and doct Rock. I like two syllables, very simple. This week in tech brought to you this week by Ethhos It's Father's Day, you know. And I think one of the most important things that happened to me when I became a father who was knowing suddenly I'm responsible I'm responsible for this little family that I've created here. One of the very first things I did is go out and get life insurance because I knew if anything happened to me and you never know, my family would be at risk I think it's really for this Father's Day, this might be something for you dads to think about. And I want to tell you, our sponsor Eethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy. And you know, it's easy because it's one hundred percent online. You can get a quote in seconds. You can apply in minutes. you can get same day coverage. And here's something I love. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions And you can get up to three million dollars in coverage. Some policy is as low as thirty dollars a month. And you'll get your lowest rate from their network of trusted. carriers So take ten minutes to get covered today with life insurance through ethos. Get your free quote at ethos d. com slash twwit. That's E T H os dot com slash twit. Application times may vary and rates may vary thhos dot com slash It really did did, you know, it's funny. when the kids were born, I was a DJ. You workking, you know, kind a low paying DJ job And it was just me and Jennifer and you know, I figured, well, this is fine. But as soon as the kids come into your life, holy cow. Um perspective really does change. And I'm very very glad we did it. although I will say to all three of you because you don't have kids. You didn't make the wrong choice.ro put it that. I remember that it was like people thought we were rich, right? But I was like, yo, we could pay seven fifty an hour, bro, to sit here and talk on a radio or something crazy. But I will say Free food and free drinks is about anywhere in town went a long way in a tourist town. Ill tell you that. Yeah. Well, I mean my m I was talking to my mum for her birthday and she's like, you realize you were, you know A overweight when you were born and also two weeks late. And I was like, Mum I had accommodation, free food, free drink. If you'd given me a TV in there, I would have been up there for another month. I would never left the room. I know. Well, you know, I feel fortunate because My kids were born in ' ninety two and ninety four. It was the internet was around But it wasn't anything like it is today. We did they had like those CD ROMs, the learning CD ROMs and they called it lapware at the time because you'd put the kid in your lap because you'd have to kind of control it and set up. And that was a great experience By the time Abby was a teenager, Neoets had come out. I think she was maybe twelve. Oh my word, that takes you back. Yeah, R remember Neopets? Theyre actually, I think they're still around. But I was a little nervous about it, but it was like Mypace, she learned how to make web pages She really enjoyed it. And I we had a little talk. I said now There may be some adults on there pretending to be kids. You should really be careful about any information you reveal you know And she said, Dad I said, what I'm a thirty three year old man from Philadelphia I the this. I know best sm. Yes. I thought, oh, I guess I don't have to worry about her. She knew, of course, intuitively, not to reveal what school she went to, not to get intimate conversations with strangers online. It's a little different today, though. and I think kids are I understand why You know, it's the inclination of governments and parents to ban social media rightight now, Congress is considering renewing the Kids Online Safety Act. It's in in committee in the Senate Meta is actually lobbying in support of it That's because they got the lawyers to deal with it. Well, that's, you know, it's called regulatory capture where you know you've got established, you make sure that the laddder is pulled up Exactly. There's All the information they need to make it work, they already got it. And so if they can cut the line now, they got the upper hand, right? They've already seen the deck They have been lobbling, lobby. And by the way, when I say meta I think Instagram is the maybe you'd say TikTok, but I think Instagram is the number one culprit here. in the algorithmic feeds, the way it is very addictive, the way kids use it, it can use it to not only to bully, but to get body dmorphia, body image issues, get the wrong message about life I think Instagram really is, I mean, I can't think of another social network that is as risky for kids. Can you? TikTok possibly, but I think Instagram is the worse offender. And Roblox, I mean, you know, but so I'd be very careful my kid were on Roblox. anyway Meta has been lobbying lawmakers for legal immunity from child harm claims tied to platforms like Instagram Uh, using the COSA Act, The provision Meta says to f is said to favor would shield online platforms for liability Undercutting thousands of cases, including cases that Meta's already lost. Remember, Meta lost that big case in Los Angeles that kind of opened the floodgate for thousands of other cases against Instagram Uh that it What Meta wants is to convert COSA into a liability shield U They are facing currently more than two thousand two thousand active lawsuits by children, families and school districts and dozens of state attorney general. attttorneys generenal Google and YouTube and Meta lost that LA trial and that was the trigger for all of that. Also, Meta got a big I think three hundred million plus settlement against them in New Mexico in a jury case Yeah. It's not the money so much, I think, for Meda as the risk of being shut down or restricted or an under sixteen ban, which would scare them. One of the things they love about COSA is it would prevent states from creating their own rules They'd only have to deal with the federal rules. And and this is what brought this to mind when you talked about Apple, they would like the gatekeepers to be responsible for the age gates. Im sure they would, yes. I mean it' OkayK, it's America, you've legalized bribery and call it campaign contributions, but this is basically what it's coming down to. Meta is scared stiff about having to ban people from their platform. and therefore, yeah, let's get Congress to write the rules that we want. Yeah. And they have the lobbying Morse power to do it. But on the other hand, I commend Apple at the WWDC conference last week, they announced I think some really good additional features. manyany of the features they announced, by the way, were already in the iPhone, but they announced they labeled them and marketed at Yeah, right. But one of the things they thought that they did that was new which is very good is they first of all, they made it easier to turn on these child protections. and they set up defaults. They said we went out to the American Pediatric Association and other experts in child protection and talk to them about where research shows and we set defaults for the amount of screen time and things like that. so that all a parent has to really do is turn it on and the defaults will be accepted. They don't have to spend a lot of time configuring it, figuring out well how much time should little Joey get online. they can change those defaults, but having those defaults in there, I think makes it a fairly simple thing for parents to do. They also created a website for parents to explain all this and and to show what the defaults are and to help them try to make those decisions for their kids Steve Gibs has been arguing for this for a long time saying, lookook Apple and Google likely do know a lot about you, right? And if you set up an iPhone for a kid and in that process you tell the iPhone, this kid is thirteen or whatever. they also have a mechanism, an API mechanism that meta and others can use, it's already built in where they the application could ask, what age group is the user in and then turn off features or even block the application based on that. All of which seems to me to make more sense than having a hundred different or thousand or a hundred thousand different ways of doing it and each application doing it itself and having to go through that process. Wh not just do it with Apple or just do it with Google and then let them tell the app? Doesn't that make sense? Yeah, I think the default thing is really important because you know it's been one of the bug bears of the industries that, you know Unless you set stuff by default, then chances are people won't use it. This was a big problem with, for example, two factor authentication with Gmail. ten years after they launched two factor authentication, only ten percent of users were actually using it. So set it up by default and they have to God, that's deeply worrying, Leo. You're looking at my discord. I'll talk about I finish your thought. I distract it too. Look This is why we tell you, look at the show, don't look at me.'t lookook at what I'm doing. Also, I'm a black cat, not a gingerat. All right, all right, now we have to show it. When Owen comes back, I'll show him One of our great we have a lot of people in the club that do AI. Pretty Fly firstis guy does a lot of stuff. This is us as a cat. and look, even the wardrobe It great. Even Owenss headset, Mikea Gorious. And it has your Japanese soccer I think I'd be more like a British short haair though You. Yeah. you and Ian are orange cats Well I was going to say Stumpy would be incredibly annoyed because she thinks ofm me as an honorary black cat, but no I mean it is quite. Actually, when last time I was on, we were talking about Alan Turing being replaced by the badger on the fiftyQid note One of the readers on the Discord channel actually generated a picture within seconds of Alan Turing riding a giant badger. that was just marvelous. It's amazing ye AI has totally taken over our Dcord channel. AI and animated gifts. It's great fun. we love it. So but I think this is a good idea. I'm sure Apple would doesn't want the liability, but on the other hand,, this is a way to make parents feel pretty good about what Apple's doing, I think. Yeah, I'm just worrying about MetA trying to legislate its way out of liability for bad actions. I don't think that's a v. They are. So the interesting thing about I want to protect seection two hundred thirty So I should say that up frront. And that protects me. I'm not worried about meta or anybody any other big tech company, but it protects me. We have this discord chat. We have forums at twit. community, we have A mastadon at tw twwit. social. In every case Section two hundred thirty protects me as the person running the site from something illegal that's posted on the site by one of our users. Of course, I moderate and I take stuff down as quickly as I can. Section two hundred thirty also protects my right, by the way to moderate. That's very important So I'm not trying to say that company like Med is responsible for every post on Facebook or Instagram. don I think seection two hundred and thirty protects them and rightly so there as it protects me. But I also think, and this is what the jury ruled in the Los Angeles case, that these companies have designed their algorithm in a way to make their stuff more sticky, more addicted. And that is a so the jury very cleverly, and I think probably it was the prosecution who thought this up or the plaintiff's attorneys that thought this up, say this is a defective product This is not this is not about Sction two hundred thirty, this is about a company that's created an effective addictive product, just like a cigarette manufacturer has created an addictive product. And they should be liable for that. And the jury agreed, actuallyually the jury New Mexico agreed, The judge agreed in Los Angeles. I think that was the right thing to do. I don't disagree with that. I know a lot of people really were concerned about that r Yeah, I mean, it' it's kind of like, you remember the Foster Sester act? Yeah, which was introduced. Yeah. Oh there was that dogie. I didn't don't show the dogie The picture of you as a cat, he might get a little bit upset. I'm just saying a Wonder doog. That is not your owner as a cat. Okaykay I'm glad I got his walk in,. That's great. It's amazing. The dog can't last three hours. I can. You know The dog cannot make it through the show. All right, well we won't go through three hours. We'll try to That's true. you were in the chair solid. I have to be here. I have to do the ads and everything. So we're just talking about Apple's changes to the iPhone to protect families. And I think if it's Father's D, I think it's appropriate to think about this a little bit. I think they built This is their website for a child's safety. And it gives, I think now I have to say, and our panelists on Mac Break Weekly, I think John Gruber said this It really is kind of to get ahead of governmental regulation, not so much to give the family something they need is to keep the government off their back. But I think this is where it should happen. And I think Apple is in a good position to do this I think that's where you set it up is in the iPhone and you give it to the iPhone and Google should do the same with Android I have no problem with this I think meta should be liable. I don't think COSa should be written in such a way that meta is not libable But I do think section see, this sounds know, kind of contradictory, but seion two hundred thirty is very important So that's a complicated story. I feel like we're starting to thread our way through this one. Yeah, I mean, I think the extent to which you can give parents you know, real tools to, you know, to help monitor and, you know, maybe Yeah maybe control their Exactly their kids usage. I mean, the truth is like a lot of adults need these, you know, need these usage u usage monitoring tools themselves Um, But you know, to the extent it's built in and it's kind of done in a thoughtful way, that we know that kids are grabbing for their parents' iPhone like you know, as soon as they you know as soon as they realize that, you know, mom and dad are spending X number of hours a day with these devices, they just they want to do what mom and dad are doing. So it's a reality Y. And you're right about the fact that a lot of it has to do as well with even some of the parents, like I think that we should almost it's kind of hard. We should have a tech literacy push back in the country Not only for the kids that are going through school, but even to readopt some of the adults who've already finished school, already finished college, everything, there should be a push where if you're going to make it patriotic, one of your patriotism things should be that you should become tech literate now Because interesteresting. Being tech illiterate is actually probably more dangerous for our national security than just about anything But you got a whole bunch of people stand on their fake patriotism. They they can't even open up their Microsoft W good. And like, you know, making decisions based on what's good for the country not good for the country with a very low tech IQ And at one point it was like, well, Takes's going to take over everything take over our job. So I don't want to know that stuff. I want to do that And then you know those of us who dove in head first, and we've always seen what the possibilities are. And now we're almost fighting for it because of the fears that it's going to do more harm than good Well, a lot of the reason why misinformation works is because you're not a tech lerric A lot of the reason why some of the other things that are bad for you as far as tech goes doesn't work is because well, you're not tech literate. So like like you said, when your kid was on' Neil Pets knew right away. Let me make my profile that I'm a thirty three year old man from Philly She was tech literate, wasn't she? That was I was impressed. understand I was small. So I've always fought for this when it comes to my niece. I've always told my sister in law that we don't have to worry about Emma because she doesn't have a low self esteem As a kid that grew up in the hood and now maybe that's is And watch the kids that did bad. The reason why I didn't get involved in all the possibilities for me to get involved in when I was in a hood is I was a high self estem.atter fact, I was cocky. So kids with high self esteem are harder to get taken in by someone who's trying to convince them to do elsewise, right? And even if you take it to the simplistic nature of getting grown adults to believe that some other adults are going to come over and steal all of their jobs, That's an esteem problem, bro. Because I tell you what, I walk around ECam like I'm not going to get fired because I know I do a good job. You know what I mean? It's possible. Like we can lose money in the boys because you don't hate. don't worry about it. You don't worry I don't worry about that because I know aemically, I know what I put into the company And I know what I'm able to bring to the table. And so we're having these conversations about the tech side, but oh, and to just add word to the fire, are we doing anything to regulate sugar and all the other crap that's b Guns in the guns. You know what I'm saying?ike we're hard this tech stuff, but we're not touching the guns in the sugar, which are probably more dangerous. Yeah, that's a good point. The biggest cause of death among children now is guns Yeah,' it's really crazy. And actually I think if you credit, Moo Espionade said, it's not even just techn lature. This is literacy in general Yeah Be at some point in time and I think all of us I don't know if we just beat it or we have better parents But at the moment, we' use eighty four as a good number. I was graduating at that time. But at ' eighty four, when we realize thatied Kids that were coming from, you know, say lesser means were able to stand toe to toe against the quote unquote, private schools. where they went out of their way to make it so that their kids can have the leg up And they started stopped investing into schools. And one of the first ones I remember, this argument full fledg and mid seventies was putting computers in our school And the only reason why we got computers in our school is because of where we were. nextext to NASA. that a bunch of the parents who worked at NASA put the computers in the schools ourselves. And then it were like, oh, parents cannot donate computers to schools. It has to come from the board of Education. I remember this fight for Gritz's Groceries and we had a commodore Right? The ugly square tryrying to try. Yeah, command to pet. That's when I got addicted. was the command to pet in about sixth or seventh grade. And that came from one of the parents that worked at NATA in Beltsville. It That's case. Go ahead. I mean, that's how Bill Gates got to stop Yeah You know, the parents in his school organized a fund to buy computing time for the kids. And that's how, you know, Microsoft kicked off in the first place U, I mean, I'm I'm slightly tricky about important so I mean computers in schools valuable. but there's been a lot of research recently that if you're actually learning from a computer, you don't remember facts as much as if you actually had to write stuff down. And I think you're still going to have to write stuff down to actually quuite frankly You know, I mean, it astonishes me that the computers are now to the point where you can write your university finals exams on a computer with an internet connection. and that should be banned right off. Harvard's bringing back provost for their exams because they don't trust kids anymore out to cheat Yeah. I mean I think in no way. It's absolutely the case that a well educated it literate populace is good for the economy, is good for the country. It is also the case that a well educated literate populace is bad for certain politicians. Really. And if they're trying to hoodwink peopleople too get them to vote for them. if they're trying to fool them with scare campaigns and scare ads then having an educated electorate is not a good thing I hate to think that that's what's going on. I hate to think that too. it sounded so conspiracy theors, but more and more the the what's the word I wouldn to say anecdotes is not anecdotes, but more and more the circumstantial evidence just keeps stacking. Leia There were definitely things with adjusting the school boards. I mean, let's go to gerrymandering. That's the easy way to put it. Like there was gender gerrymandering even back in the education system and it's like, well, with these kids can't get that smart because they get too smart, then you know, now we got to you know, take care of them kind of situation. And the whole thing that again, I don't know why we keep L Reagan today, but coming up with the myth of the welfare mom Like that's just dumb, bro. L nobody's going to have kids to make more money, bro. That's just really stupid. I'm kind of reminded of the old George Carlin sketch where he was talking about this. and he's just like, they want people to be educated just enough to push the buttons and pull the levers Not any more than that. And it's just like you watched that from thirty years ago and you're kind of like Well, that was actually surprisingly on point. would I mean and the reality though is like the AI job effect is it's going to make jobs more complicated and require more education, more critical thinking. Y. And You know, to the extent it's not eliminating jobs, it's transforming them.. raising the bar for what we need as a society from our education One would hope that every elected official in this country is roooting for this country to be the best it can be to be the smartest and the strongest and the most effective Ver fact this is the same government that actually added a journalist to a signal conversation about weapon strikes for you know I mean you know I think in the best of all possible worlds, elected officials are there not to enrich themselves or gain power because they want to make the place a better place And one would hope that that's why people are trying to get elected. We could disagree about what makes it a better place. I understand that Uh, we should all be wanting to make it better. Yeah It doesn't seem to be the case. Always. and those are the people you should not vote for. That's all I have to say about that Wayo, speaking of mistakes is now recalling its Rbo taxis because they're driving into highway construction zones There are at least thirteen instances. Now Wayo is in San Francisco. boy Oh and you see himember I was in Sanrancisco on Wednesday Every third car is a Wmo now in San Francisco. Oh, I mean, when I'm up early going to the gym, like it's me it's me on a bike and a bunch of Waymos. Do you feel safer with the Waymos? You know, they do tend to stop more, you know, But they drive generously. Yeah. Yeah So like if they dect, you know, my presence on a bike, they tend to Just reflective. I read somebody saying Ring and Waymo is weird because they're over cautious in some areas and then they step on it, they floor it other is. Yeah. And I w to know if Owen if the Waymo ever pull up to a whistle and be like, look at those haves Well I mean My m was Thankgiving. I mean, my mum was over for Thanksgiving and I wanted to take her in one and she flat out refused. She's like, I understand. I've never been in one. It makes me nervous. I understand. I mean they're really safe. I mean too One Saturday night in San Francisco. Yeah, I know we're coming to that. but we're coming to where they're not so safe. They felt really safe. pllus you can choose the soundtrack that you listen to. So in my case it was the Night Rider theme tune, but Dag go I tell you one thing that every American should have to experience though, I had my first ride in the black taxi And oh yeah. we going from going from Waterloo to Heathrow, right? It's kind of an expxpensive. Oh the London camp was easier. Yeah. Well, it turns out having a flight Actually we didn't I flew on Sunday, but moving from Waterloo to Heathrow on a Saturday during football dumb. Okaykay, very very dumb the way that this guy knew every single back road When I found myself in Kent, I'm like, why the heck am I in Kent? Well, because according to Google Maps, if you went on the freeway, you'd be done Because time you come out by the GTch stadium where Brinford played, like there was just a lot of traffic at that time, right? Because you know I mean, London taxi drivers do a thing of knowowledge, which is a five year test. That'sree, but it's five Oh my go It was brilliant. It was What do they have to know in the knowledge? Everything. Every single road in London. I mean literally So they have Google maps in their brain basase. In their brain. Pretty much. Yeah Yes. I mean, there's a reason why they can Sunday. I'm sorry, you understand on a Saturday or Sunday when there's game time. Like of course when the stadium iss getting out Everything is messed up, right? So all the stations all you saw literally there in the premier side, there's six teams. If you count the under teams, like there's almost twenty teams in London proper And so when everybody's playing on a Saturday towards the end of the season, it's a mad house and yet it was just it was like it was like butter, bro. And there was a USC fight that night as well. So this guy just got through traffic like nobody and everybody should experience it at least once in a. How well do they get paid U They basically sef they're self employed. so But it's goodoney what you're saying. Yeah,'s I mean, it's very good money. And they defend it quite I remember when Uber launched in London And taxi drivers didn't protest about it. They just went around to the Uber office and completely trashed it. knew the way to the Uber office, which was really impressing. Yeah, the taxi was entered in Uber. Uber was Dooky and so was Bolt. I didn't really like Bolt H just due to taxi is better So what about self driving vehicles? Are there self driving vehicles in the WayMo is launching in London this year? Yeah subent testing Yeah, they'reready test at the moment An Uber driver may not know every road It may not have the knowledge, but we know the Wayo does, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm a little bit concerned because Wayoos have an awful lot of very expensive hardware in easily smashable places on the outside of the car. And I get the feeling a couple of London cab drivers are going to have a take a more direct action approach against the competition. That willll be interesting. So it's not the first time Weimo has been Yank. So what they do is they slowly expand its capabilities. It was only recently they allowed WMos onn the freeway at all, right Yeah. Unfortunately Since they did that, there have been thirteen instances of robotaxis driving into highway sections that were closed for construction. You know lights, barricades, barriers, all of that stuff, they go plow right through it Six of them were in Phoenix, Arizona in April. Seven occurred in San Francisco in May. may nineteenth, Waymo pulled all its Rbo taxis from highways and they are working on a fix. So the Waymo's are still going, but they're only on city streets. It's not the first time they've done this, you may remember U In fact, it's the sixth time You may remember Wayo recalled its Rbo taxis after they driving into flooded roads Yeah. in December, they had a recall to address the vehicle's illegal behavior around school buses. Low speed collisions with chains and gates and telephone poles have been a problem And there was another one Solving a problem regarding towed trucks I mean, on the plus side, they haven't killed anyone yet. It's not like this is the Uber of driving car which actuallyill kill the They k cat Oh yes, the Bedega cat. cat. M more. Beloved cat. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think they have killed one pedestrian in Phoenix, did they? not? Was that Wayo or Oh no That was GM. That was the that was the General Motors C cruise. cruise that was Uber, I think. Okay. Yeah with a women's test driver in the car I should write Yeah Tue actually parked on someone after they kn after ar That that was another didn't kill them. So that's the that's the good ish news Weayo says they've driven more than one hundred and seventy miles autonomously They have demonstrated a thirteen times reduction in serious industry injury or worse crashes comppared to human drivers, I believe that. I mean, we're hugely terrible drivers. yeah I mean, I used to work in Barcaderro and you just looked out the window and you would see, as you pointed out, Owen, three or four Wmos just circulating around. So I'm not sure they' actually cut down on traffic per se, but they're certainly safer than human drivers. And I've got a friend who also cycles in the city and he says he feels A lot more comfortable having a wayme coming up behind him than he does a human driver. You at least know it's paying attention. The human driver may not be Weimo is going to launch in twenty more cities this year, including London and Tokyo So there was will be in a way good, but not in the major parts, like in the outside side of the streets. I think it will be good because people are very good about not being in the streets during a crosswalk and things of that nature. For instance, here in Hawaii, it is like a four hundred something dollars fine to enter the crosswalk once the numbers start counting You're not supposed to enter once the numbers start counting. We know what everybody does. As soon as they see the number, they try to run across the street You and us we have a lot of in Houla peopleeople over the age of seventy because this is where you make your money, you come here to retire, Leo, wink, wink, I got a couple of spots open in my building. Dude, I see dudes enter the street. the numbers on seven And I'm like, yo, papa, you cannot make that crossing in seven seconds talk. So not everybody is waiting. and people in Tokyo just don't do that. So I think it might be okay in Tokyo, but those side streets are really skinny bro. They're tiny Same in London. I mean, there's a lot of streets down there that are just like I remember when There was a lot of talk about people in London buying Wank tax sorry, cyber trrucks. Gting trying to get one of those down a London street is just impossible. And in fact, they're illegal in the UK because they're not builting. Cyberrucks, the Tesla cybertruck is illegal in the UK They're illegal in the UK and Europe because it's Well no it's not that,s they're not built for pedestrian crashes So under EU and UK law, you have to have the car designed in such a way as to minimize the chance of a pedestrian getting hit by well, if a pedestrian gets hit by one, they're not going to get killed. So you have rounded fronts Oh that you familiar If you're familiar with them as the Miata, they used to have pop up headlights. thoseose went because pop up headlights will knacker a pedestrian if you run into them. This is why you know things like the F one hundred fifty and other American gargantuan truck trucks aren't sold over there Because I't see anybody under six foot tall over your h notough one hundred fifty. I mean, they're just or at least the two hundred fifty, the big ones, they're really big. Yeah. I mean I try a little guysy terrifying. like, gotta run truck. What is it about guys in big trucks? When you guys are the way we lift a truck, right? Everybody has a truck that's like seven feet off the ground here. and like the people get out of it and they're like little tiny dudes You got station gotes Yes did. All right, let's take a little break here If anybody's dogs need walking, this would be the Fitz is good. he's nap. Oh Oh yeah, what a sweet.'s we don't have the most time. That's Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times and his little doggie Fritz Fitits areit Fitsure for Fitzgerald. Oh cute F sculpt F Scott. F Scott. Irish doggy. A little Scotsman known as Ian Thompson. B of Scots so the Duke of Edinburgh was, but yes, it all right. Well he's from Edinburgh Yeah, well, he was from Greece, but Okay, that's true. First, you're talking about Philip. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, from Hawaii Are you a Hawaiian? No, that's that is gets people in the mainland in trouble. Like Native Hawaiians is a kingdom. It's a set of people and theyo we stole the land from them. We. we did it first, but true story. I always have to correct my mainland people. like I am from Hawai but I'm Hawaiian.'s not the same thing as being in California I'm just from Hawai. We don't know' in When we were in the big Island and we loved it, by the way. justust loved it a couple last month. And got to go down to see the Captain Cook statue. But I think that's where they killed Captain Cook, I think. Yeah That's where they killed him and I him. Yeah. this week, I'm gonna go put a cone on his head Is that what you do? You put the con I went to now now I just make it more fun because everybody fans theres If you ever go to Glasgow, there's a statue of the Duke of Wellington onking. and it has a traffic cone on its head everyvery time the council removes it, the traffic cone goes back on. And apparently in Boston when the Scots fans came over, an awful lot of statues ended up with traffic cones on their heads. Oh's Yes if you if you check it out there's it's almost certain tons of them. it's so He just kind of does kind of be to have a traffic code on his head And It's a perfect fit. There's a drag queen on Rupul's drag race, UK who statue as one of her outfits. Oh, I love it. All right. now I mean, the thing is the Duke of Wellington isn't popular in Scotland and there is actually a verse of the national anthem, which is seldom sung these days and with a rush for rebellious Scots to crush U But yeah, he's not that popular and the traffic cone is just The council stopped trying to take it down because you know it would be gone and then the next night it' be up there again. and now Boston's getting a spill of that as well. Sometimes even the horse gets a traffic cone.' It's like now the new phrase is going to be nothing under the kilt, C on the head, let's put Well, you always get asked when you wear a kilt, what do you wear underneath it? And there are three answers my great uncle who left me his kilt when he died, said there are three answers to that If you're on the pull and looking to meet up with a nice lass then it's the future of Scotland. If it's anyone in general, then you say my courage. And if you're looking to start a fight, you say your wife's lipstick. Oh I like it. I like it I've always wanted to buy a boy tartan because my last name is Scottish and so I've always wanted to go buy one and my goal is to get there. I have a buddy who I met when I was in UK. herer husband used to work for Dalmore. So she says if I ever back like he can cononnect me to a lot of the whiskey places that I would want to visit. Very nice. I've worked in the industry for like forty years, so I can't wait to go back Excuse me for just a second, I think there's loud music downstairs. I wantm to close the door. Oh, Leo, if it's too loud, you're too old Ohude but no why for ass this guy is winning the chat today This is great. No, I mean, second seeven years ago, Facebook reminded me U ye, we went on a we did the North Coast five hundred, which is a tour around the north coast of Scotland. And on the very first night there was a bar there with two hundred whiskys and it was great for planning out because it's just like, right, I'll try that. Yeah, we'll pop by that distillery and that distillery and that distillery and it saved us snful lot of driving Good. O no We all wish we were there right now, but we're not. We're right here doing this week in Tech, which is brought to you this week by box You know that name. If you're an enterprise trying to transform your business, withith AI You're likely facing an all too common challenge. Most AI tools are good at public knowledge. That's what they're trained on. Do they know your business? No, of course not. Do they know your product roadmaps? Well, how would they? 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Visit box. com slash AI if you want to learn more. box d. com slash AI box. com slash A I Well, here come the AI specs And it's not from maybe who you thought it would be from H Yes St's not meta It's not Apple It's actually the company that first started, Oh man, I've been logged out again of Bloomberg. A This This is what John Gruber calls a dick over. It's not a pop overver. I'm already paying for Bloomberg But for some reason it's just decided to cover the entire page. I was gonna tell you about Snap's New spectacles. Yes Snap is launching AR spectacles. They are not cheap two thousand one hundred and ninety five dollars they don't make you look Super cool. They I was going say they kind of remind me of a friend of mine's in the American military and the glasses they issue with you issue with, if you need glasses, arm Yeah, I mean, these are they're basically called rape protection glasses because they're not ugly. We call them MMG's birth control glasses in your birth control right. Okay. So on the left, actually this is Harry, thank you for not locking me out. This is Harry McCracken's artle of this compomany. instead of Bloomberg U On the left, that's the original Snap spectacles, which I had They they didn't have AI. They just had a camera. buuilt in, they looked kind of cool. On the right is these new twenty twenty six spectacles. Harry calls them the great, great, great grandchild of the original A snap special. Iag genene on the bottom. I don't I don't I You know, I really am a believer in this form factor for AI U But these are damn ugly. Yeah. These really are BCGs. Also mean kindind of expensive. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, also they're kind of I don't like them because any of the glass form factors because they're kind of intrusive. I was reading an article about one journalist who was checking into a hotel And he actually asked the you know the receptionist was wearing them. And he said, Can you take those off, please? because you're about to look at my credit card and I really don't want that information cost on stayed stayed on. you know, And it's honestly, I have a friend who wears the meta glasses and whenever he has them on, I just don't want to be scanned when I'm walking down the street. You' get over I'm old fashioned. You'll get over.'s gonna have them. Yeah. I actuallysol love these though. and t. Oh, I got them too. Yeah. These are my Gy ones. I just bought new Gyen twoos. They're actually charging upstairs. Did you bought the new ones? I got the same case, exact one Yeah The lady the lady in this story mis're talking about the meta. don't worry. But it turns out the case is interchangeable, but I did get the new Gents. And what I really like about them where they really come in handy is a lot of times when I'm sitting in, you know an airplane, whatever, we haven't done a takeoff yet I haven't put them my other headphones yet I can still hear what I'm listening tocast What's going on? Yeah I can still hear what's going on. So my number one use case for them is listening to podcasts or something when I still need to be ambiently aware of what's going on. The other thing that it works really well for, likeike I said, I do my walk in talks, my ADHD brain dums where I have to get in my steps so I walk And I just basically brain dumped new idea or client thing that I'm working on or something. and I just record all of that and I have it going into Whisper Flow And then for Whisper Flow, I basically convert it into things. So it's a little bit better than pllaud in a sense. but yeah, I don't go around creeper recording So you can so okay, this is good to know. So You can use the metedical glasses to feed into your own AI transcription ser. Yes. I useis combination of Whisperflow and audio pin, and I just keep switching back and forth because there is there an SDK an API? Is there an MCP? I use it just as the microphone for the one that's on the app on the phone didnidn't want to put into the glasses per se because I don't trustm. I mean, that's my dream. Eventually tie these to your AI Yeah and and then everything that you see becomes part of the You know, the valuable information. Here's a picture of imagene Heap Wearing, she doesn't look too bad. Notice they tint They have a variety of tints they can apply. So they're trying to make them somehow Kip, I guess we can get over it. What Darren Oaky says in our Discord chat is actually a good point, which is if you don't tie them to a phone and Snap doesn't have a phone, Ma doesn't have a phone. They're inevitably going to be clunky because they have to put more computing into the glasses more battery, more computing. These only run for four hours Although you can charge them up to four times with the case Also's been really long when you're just listening to things, listening to music or whatever, they do run really long Another reason why these come in super, super handy is being I travel a lot and of course when I go to Japan, I can read likeike a o signers. I can read an eighth grader. but anything harder than that I gott to be like what is to say? And unlike many countries, Japan does not make any concession to English. It's in Japanese and's Japanese. Yeah. That's one actually one of the pro tips when you go to a restaurant and they say no English menu or that's gonna be off the chain It's gonna to be much better. You don't want to them. they don't won a lot of people say they're being mean or racist. They don't want to let you in because they don't want to give you b surface because they can't communicate. So normally when I' They go, okay, come in come come in. They're excited. That now not only they get to hang out, they get to, you know, watch me screw up my Japanese or whatever, but Snap's trying to get over the hump of these ugliness by having they call specs visionaries Here's Golden State R to Jimmy Butler wearing him. See if you get enough famous st is wearing them maybe people will say, Ohh, you know, price work was though back It's very, very expensive. Yeah. I mean, the celebrity thing didn't work with Google Glass. Why would it work now? Yeah Ggle gllass was weird and asymmetrical like Yeah. Yeah. No I mean, I remember when Googlelass Glass came out Google got really quite annoyed with the register because we coined the term glassholes and used it in every single article And eventually I mean, we had angry phone calls from their PR, just like, no, we're not going to give you one view when you're calling I get bad ans for him. Well no I mean, the triumph was when Google actually used the term itself in a press release saying, donon't be a glass hole and it was just like ye, snaail it. does that Predate the turf for Glaswegans or after. No no, don't you don't insult Glaswegians. Now if I I said that h my head while wearing real people say that. Yeah. It might be okay. Well, they also have the phrase the Glasgow kiss, which is being head bututted. so Yeah definitely don't want to do that. We say that about Massachusetts people. We call them massoles ye. That's right But That actually predates glass holes Anyway Harry says they no longer look like a cybertruck affixed to your face. I might disagree with that. ye Nors In't run into any pedestrians with the lawn Oh my gosh, this guy is killing me. Unlike many products, it's self contain, no external battery pack, input device other than your hands or dependency on a smartphone. That's why they're so Funk They weigh they don't weigh that much. one hundred They were four four and a half to four point eight ounces. That's not that heavy. I don't know But you know, Leo, in because of sort of K pop slash hip hop, The style of glasses that these are is very common, right? chunky kind of big chunk. Yeah. So Rayband just dropped a new collaboration with Aab Rocky and they're the puffier Raybands But Oliver People's a bunch of brands, Tom Ford, they have these sort of giant thick frames that are built off the original Blues Brothers Wayfare or the BCGs And so they don't look that far rem moveved, but they're like extra chunky Rrays have a heads up display built in bigger than the meta Rayband displays Um I think it was, u let me see if I can find the uh angle of it. It doesn't fill your it doesn't fill the whole screen, but it's about I think it's two or three times bigger than the Rayband displays. I want to say fifty one degrees, but I'm have to find this in Harry's article. They have sound, they have, you know Many of Harry points out the original Macintosh sold for eight thousand dollars when adjusted for inflation. So twenty one ninety five is not too outrageous. It is laptop cost. Can you do everything you can do with them that you could do with a laptop? I don't think so. I think this is a very early product. Early adopters will probably be interested. V very early adopters will be interested. I don't see it as a mass appeal product by any means anymore than the Apple Vision Pros were. I can't wait to see what Apple finally gets around to though And Apple has the iPhone, and I think that that's going to make a big difference because now you have the computing platform off the glasses in your pocket. And it's internet connected. It helps with weight, it helps with size, it helps with battery life. And it can have much faster processor too. The iPhones are very heavy duty processors now. Yeah, Metters are a little slow as far as the AI stuff goes in the glasses. So it'd be really interesting to see what Apple can do with especially dedicated access to the chips that are inside our phone You know what inbase I Snaps, spun the business out into a subsidiary. It's called specs Inc And these are the specs Um We've been seeding developers with them for a while So there will be some stuff you could turn yourself into a cat Or a lizard H You can twist your face like silly putty. I don't know with whom, I guess if you're in a call, I don't know. Snapchat shows you what your camera sees the moment you launch the app So that's kind of nice. And that was something that Ray Ban displays, I think do as well as you could finally see what you're gl because you can't write with these, Owen I'm sorry Doc, you can't. No, no see the I really thought hard about getting displays, but I was like, now I'm just get the regular ones because I don't want to be heavy. They're expensive. But we'll see anyway, Snapchat is getting into the game with a chonky version of of these glasses, the specs And Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat said, this this we're counting on this going for. You know what? A lot of the a lot of the I don't know what the terminology is. I don't want to call them influencers. I hate that word. but the Karlie Kylie Jenner Justin Bieber type clan that grew up with making Snatchchat what it is today, they would be who they're going to use to kind of get people into this. Yeah. It's going to become a very expensive play for parents that have to buy their kids like thousand ousand Mbe. Ty Jter has one.y Cvle has one. Yeah, there he goes. Charlemagne. But I mean, are there going to be knockos of the Oh one hundred percent Yeah That's where it. I think it comes. I think I'm gonna do what everybody is saying. I'm gonna to waaille apple up with it might not be next year. It might be two years from now. but I think Chinese manufacturers are going to make a much cheaper, much better version of these as far as I can see. But if you're not attached to an ecosystem, I don't know if it's a good why, I think you want to be attached to the Apple ecosystem or I think Snap would have been better to make them cheaper, but make it like, you know, platform gnostic where it's very much a Snapchat thing so they can bring it. Snapchat is secretly grown again, but like to tie it directly into Snapchat and then you know, like use that as the play whereere they' going to make the money off the advertisement layer? That would have made more sense. but two thousand is a lie, bro Yeah for. And Snapchat prescription. Snapchat sock is down like U ninety five percent plus from their twenty twenty one high. That's why they're saying We need this to survive. Yeah. Yeah It's almost a pivot. It's a swing. Yeah swing in a m. Fox is spending twenty two billion dollars to buy Roku. Oh my God, I'm so mad. And now the picture is starting to become a little bit clearer Uh Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox says they're going to keep the two companies separate Remember, Roku doesn't just make little streaming devices, they make TVs. And I think this is a big play for the streaming market and the kinds of data that the TV's Yeah The big play thus far with they, I mean, talk about your letting your hand out on the table, right? We're sitting here with all the aces Two weeks before World Cup starts, I get a notification on my Apple TV that the Fox Sports app will no longer work. What? You need to get Fox One. Okay? I only have the Fox Sports app on my phone for two reasons, football and football Like other than that, I don't use it. I don't want to go anywhere near that network, right? I had the Fox regular app there because of there was a TV show at one point that I dis li like that I not longer watch. But yeah, they moved everything into one app. And so when you go to look for your World Cup game There it will be Lemin Yul and, you know, the Saudi player on the front. and then right underneath it, Fx shows. All of the Fx shows that are like I'm a patriot. I'm a soldier. Let's watch arrmymen do this kind of thing. That's all on the next fold. So even before you get to the fold There's all of the foxphere. right underneath it. Exactly. too get to the World Cup coverage, you got to go down, down, down, down, down about seven times down the fold and then you could get to the hub that will take you straight into the World Cup. Now of course, you if you know how to use Nerd tech, you can swipe left and get the tiny little menu And scroll all the way down to the bottom, seven things down and find the one that says sports, which will take you over. But even when you get to that page, there's the World Cup Banner, then there's all the US football and baseball and whatnot, NASCAR. and then more shows about how the American might of this NASCAR driver and blah' so It's all about selling fun. The propagandizing The World Cup hub on Fox One is absolute Dooky and it irritates the crap out of me. Let them get their hands on Roku And oh my God, brain cells are over. Well, according to the Verge, there's unlikely to be any regulatory hurdles. Of course there's not Certainly in the United States. That's so last century. And even from the EU Um, because Roku and Fox have kind of a small footprint in the EU. So I worry this I worry what Doc was talking about is going to happen to Formula One when Apple fully takes it over. and we're going to see exactly the same kind of situation. Media consolidation used to be considered a bad thing, but it's very much the vogue at the moment. already they've introduced ads into my Formula One stream. I'm not too happy about that. through. Oh, really it? Yeah The thing about Fox that people forget is they own this This streaming service called TubI, which is a fast or free ad supportorter television service. In other words, just free streaming. with yes, ads But as Netflix has shown, as Amazon has shown, where, you know, where they've put in ad supported tiers where they used to just have, you know The pure premium streaming services. People generally prefer to pay a little less or nothing and put up with some ads Um, you know, we, you know, we we the media elite may not like them, but that's it seems to be the way of the world. Now there's basically two players with good fast services, it's Fox and Paramount. Paramount has Pluto, which is a really good service They're looking at ways to combine Pluto and Paramount plus And when you put all of the Warner Bothers content, HVO into into that system. It could be really effective distribution. All of these companies are looking for a post broadcast, post cable future. And I think this is lock. The scariest part about what Owen just said is now that Paramount Pluto play is Skynet dance. I'm gonna call it Skynet. You do what you want. And then the other one is the Fox Roku play, right? So again, you talk about trying to get one handed side talking And again, this is just TV, right? This is not news. This isn't that thing of the, you know, fake news versus whatever news. It's just regular TV. But when you're watching the World Cup And right now all of the commercials that haven't been bought before by somebody has been filled in with commercials for toie oriented shows, a whole bunch of like America first oriented shows. And then man, I have never seen so many ads for Jesus in the middle of a freaking World Cup. Like, I mean, it's not I mean I'm trying to be facetious. if you go by the global scaler thing and the amount of people teams and stuff that are playing That's it would be I could see Catholic side maybe. Maybe I could even see a little bit of the Islamic side of it in a commercial, but all the commercials are like Jesus commercials You know, I'm like You just have to watch your Wlcome match on a Fox onene app And you'll see it. You'll be like, oh my God, they're counter prorogramming like heavily with the ad space that they didn't sell because I think a lot of people were scared into believing or companies were scared into believing that World Cup wouldn't be big because of the weird stuff that has been going on here Because of the FIFA Peace Prize. Yeah there I was just nice about it. But if you see the counter programming, I'm like, bro, if my brain was dirty and was ready to be washed see hockey get bit could see how could become a Fox fan watching the world.. You just have to go and see just watch one game in a Fox one app versus watching it on your regular TV and you'll see exactly what I'm saying. You'll be like, oh my God And's why I watch it because it's four K. The one that comes on TV is coming in two K, which I think again, they did on purpose What are they gonna to do to Roku City though? What's Fox going to do to Roku City? What's Roku City? That's the screensaver, Everybody watching. Oh, the little screens saavers. Yeahah. Oh I do the aquarium Yeah. You're gonna to see Gretch and Carlson floating. Like that's some of the most watched stuff on Ripo is those screens. So like they're gonna put something there, right ye. I mean, with Apple Aerialos, bro. like I get so many people that tell me that they just like to watch the Apple Aerialos especially when you said I like the aial underers I love the areas. see there're beautiful dophs and sharks out there. I love the aerials One more speaking of underwater, midjourney has gone from generating images to full body ultr scans sound scans I'm not sure how this works. Midjourney, which was until, you know Maybe Nano Banana dominant image generating tool. We use it like crazy, but I haven't used it in ages because the You know, the frontier companies have kind of caught up. So they announced a new business They um a ultrasound scanner. Full body scanner that they say uses forty. Butterfly, this is a ultrasound tech company, butterfly network ultrasound on chip imaging modules. and then they use Midjourney's AI capabilities to analyze it to create a full body scan. There's some question about what kind of resolution the scan is going to have and how useful it will be, But they want to compete with companies like Pre Nuvo who do, you know five thousand dollars or maybe they're not quite that expensive two thousand dollars MRIs on demand MRIs, not ordered by your doctor, but just for you. they want to have these ultrasounds everywhere and you just walk in and you get dunked in water And then u They plan to put ten of the scanners into a mid journey spa location in Union Square, which will open before the end of Union Square San Francisco, by the way, which will open before the end of twenty twenty seven And then they're going to try to try to do it all over the country It's a complete pivot for mid journey.s So Union Square is becoming this hub for like AI companies. Oh, is it? Really? Yeah It used to be where Macy's was, right? There Macy's is still there. Okay. Macy's actually deployed some interesting location shopping technology back in the day. So it's it's been a tech playground for a while, Union Square, but you've got the worldld coin, you know, the order Oh, that's not the order square in the Yeah. And I wouldn't be surprised if you saw more of these. Interestingly, it's The midjourney spa is specifically on Grand Avenue, which is like a very high end part of Union square. It's not on the square proper. It's like an it's that's where all the fancy like Wh where the Apple store is, right? Apple Stores on the top the northeast corner Stockton in post, but it's a block from the. This is a block block east and it it's even pososther. So it it can't be cheap real estate their play is, Is it, you know, is it visibility?? that may be You know, it's hard to understand how that fits with image and video generation. It's basically pushing all your chips into the middle. You're betting the whole bank, just like Snap is doing on a high risk, high reward bet and just crossing your fingers. It's funny when you think about it, like at one point you would go down there. I remember every time I had to go to Union to go to Bong and Olson and just to watch the stereo go Rember that? Rember You got Tiffany Sackword Avenue Yeah right there. Strangely enough on the on the p you want to say Pul but his post. On the post side, there's a doughnut shop that's like two steps away from the corner which is off the chain that I used to always go to But it's weird that that has become AI thing. And I do remember when we first got, you know, like the Macy's was doing the location based drops on your phone when you would walk in. They were using beacon, Beacon AI because I knew somebody that worked there. And that was like, you know, your iPhone screen would show you things when you'd go into certain stores down there and it was like the test ped for all of that. So it makes sense the lineage is there Yeah, it's kind of a weird playate. it's just in that one spot though. Take one more break and then wrap it up with some final stories you're watching this week in tech with Ian Thompson, Owen Thomas, Dock Rock. So glad to have you, of course, all our club members.ang make this show possible. Huh? I'm changing my name to Dachson Doson Rockson. Thompson Dockson. Thompson Sorry, sorry, Leo. Ian Thompson Rock. Rock and Thompson and and some other guys He Rocking Thompson I can live with. Rock and Thompson. I like you. Ohw and the Rock And Toxin, toxin. No, toxin's not good. We'll figure it out. We're working on it. The AI' help us in just a bit Our show today brought to you by Zcaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. We talk about the potential rewards of AI. and for any business, it's something you can't ignore The risks are there too, and you don't want to ignore those, the loss of sensitive data It attacks against enterprise managed AI and plus generative AI is a boon just as it is for your business, for the bad guys, for threat actors, helping them create rapidly create phishing lures and write malicious code and automate data instraction. and they can do this all at speed is very hard to fight Some of it is just completely inadvertent. just information leaked because your employees are using AI to analyze things like your tax returns. I think this is probably the source of this fact. There were one point three million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications It's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. Just ask Chad Pallet. He's the acting CO at BioIVT. He says Z Skiller help them reduce their cyber premiums, their insurance premiums by fifty percent At the same time, double their coverage and improve their controls. Take a look at this from Chat AsZ or as long as you've got internet, you're good to go. A big part of the reason that we moveved to a consolidated solution away from SDAN and VPN is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe style environment. With thesekillers Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. There's Zero trrust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at Zcaler d. com slash security. That's Zcaler slash security so much for supporting this week in tech. We were talking earlier, I forgot to mention this. we were talking about the rising prices in commodities and mummy. Nothing has cancellled their inexpensive phone, their low price phone, the CMF due to rAM prices. Nothing's foundounder says, we can't build the budget phone as a price price that makes sense. Carl Pay said the RAM shortage has impacted most of the company's mid range phones as well the phone four A memory cost doubled The memory is now the most expensive component in the smartphone, moreore than half of the overall cost Not good No You do wonder where this is going to end up. I mean it could be one of the side benefits of the AI bubble finally popping as the memory prices come down whent people always ge superficial data centers don't get built after all, and there's a big surge of memory coming onto the market, but it's not looking good at the moment You actually had a story in the San Francisco Biness journal about Boom being caused by this AIIPO wave. Oh and, let me close the pop upps there The AI IPO wave is coming, but the Bay Area hasn't seen a boom like this one. How is it going to change the Bay Area? Yeah, this was written by my colleague, our editor in chief Jeremy Owens. The key difference is that the wealth from these companies it's going to be highly concentrated when These companies grew so fast that the kind of early cohort of employees who got stock options was much smaller than say at Facebook or Twitter or Salesforce. You know, those companies grew gradually over time, you know, raised several rounds of venture capital U Op and AI and Anthropic have done everything at kind of turbo speed And their valuations are nearing a trillion dollars already private companies. SpaceX, which now has an AI story is is I believe still worth about two trillion dollars on the on the public market. they minted what four hundred millionaires with SpaceX stock and Yeah, that's some like tens of centim millionaires. Cafeteria workers at spaceet included, whichich reminds you of the you remember the Google massage therapist who Yeah, who got soock options Or orr the Ma the guy at Meta who painted the mural on the wall. Yes the gphologist. Yeah. they didn't want to they didn't want to give him money. they giveave him stock But you know, this is not going to be like a broad based kind of wealth generator. It's going to be, you know, Manssions in Pacific Heights in Atherton It's interesting. yourour cover story actually points out that these companies are not leaving San Francisco You know, people like Elon have famously moved to Texas, but open AI and anthropic. A have really put down roots and they've become Uh, you know Besides the near trillion dollar valuation, they're also both near or at a million square feet of office space. Wow. And you know, that implies Uh, you know, that implies u employee accounts in the, you know, in the high single thousands Um, you know, that's enough room for roughly, you know, off the top of my head that's six thousand seven thousand employees worth of space. Now, anthropic has leased a big I power for its headquarters. They have not moved in yet. That's going to be next year. So they're not there yet, but they they really are planning on being large, large employers in in San Francisco I you know, I wrote about Salesforce overtaking Wells Fargo as the largest private sector employer. A in San Francisco. That happened several years ago, I believe twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen we could see easily see open AI or anthropic. They're both growing quickly overtaking salesfce in u notot so many years In terms of employee count W they take over that Penis building downtown You know, I think Salesforce has a has a long term lease there. Anthropic actually has kind of Um Weered the market on real estate around Salesforce Tower. There's a street, Howard Street. It's two blocks south of Market Street And we've nicknamed it Anthropic Row because they have they have u along Basically three consecutive blocks of Howard Street. They have leases in like every building, three hundred, four hundred five hundred Howard the Have we seen this before with I mean, Twitter was in San Francisco You know, Twitter' is not a bad comparison. When Twitter leased, you know its its space in thirteen fifty five market, that was seen as transformative for mid markarket. Now that didn't turn out. Twitter of course is now X and they are completely out of San Francisco Um They do have some operations in Palo Alto, along with XAI So they have not quit California despite the, you know the reincorporation in Texas U But yeah, I think, you know, that would be the the Biggest analogy, or frankly, Salesforce moving into Salesforce Tower. That was Big statement uh, you know, a decade or so ago Yeah, we still call it Salesforce Tower, but Salesforce didn't build it True. Yeah. it was they were they were just the flagship tenant And you know, ironically, we're roughly where openpAI is now, Salesforce was going to put its campus there Oh But they decided it wasn't going to be enough space. so they They snagged about a third of Salesforce Tower instead and became the namesake of the to This is the twenty thousand square foot. building that we'll Call the Anthropic squatty buildilding Yeah, that That's our little building in Jackson Square. Jackson Square is still very popular with like smaller AI startups. It's it's a little neighborhood immediately immediately north of where I'm sitting in the financial district. It's a nice neighborhood Yeah, I mean and this is a little bit more looks like more like an AI company. That' That's fancy, fancy. Now that is that's part of a complex. You see it's actually four buildings around an intersection four, you know, more or less similarly designed buildings That's called Foundry Square. and that's Um You know recently that's been leased by Black Rck, Ok PWC. So big financial law accounting firms. Now Anthropic is taking over a lot of that st. How many employees do these companies have? Isn't the whole point of AI that you don't need to have hundreds of thousands of employees? Well, you know, that's the interesting thing, right? is, you know, you need These companies are betting on adoption in the enterprise. And you know, you can't just like AI your way into a Fortune five hundred company. Right. You need salespeople, you need sales engineers, you need you know, consultants, they're going public so you need leg. Now of course they're all, you know, telling a good story about how they use AI to make their their own internal operations more efficient, and I'm sure they're doing that you know, the reality is like they've got hundreds of open jobs like at the moment that they're that they're hiring for. One million square feet of office space between high anthropic in downtown San Francisco. Yeah, and you know, open AI has really cornered Mission Bay Anthropicas corner that, you know, that part of the financial district where they are. they want dense walkable campuses. They want that creativity. they want that vibe of being in person Um, So in a way, Amazon and Microsoft and Boeing kind of made Seattle what it is. and Amazon's you know kind of wild architecture in Seattle and so forth. and And Microsoft founder who, you know, built that Rank Cerry museum and so forth, Paul Allen. Paul I wonder if San Francisco is going to be shaped by these AI companies in the decades to come much like Seattle was. I mean, it was for a minute, right? And then, you know, it kind of wentner because well, it's been going through, I mean, San Francisco went through a bed. through changes, right? So that building Is it right across from the Ferry building? Is that the market onene market building? One market is interesting because it's really been struggling. Right? Be that was Twitter, right No Google Google was Google was in one market. You're right, You've got a good memory Salesforce before u before it was in Salesforce Tower I had one market as its long time home Um But one market is actually we've written about the kind of struggle that building has had with refilling vacancies, especially after Google ull out Google is still in San Francisco. They've got a they've got a building actually I can like practically S Street. see it Spear Street, but also one maritime Plaza. they have a big presence in that tower. They've also got offices in the Ferry builduing I was surprised to learn recently 's that's the corner, right? Market in Sar is where Market is and then the Ferry building, they used to have the bomb as the rollie rollie truck He useds to make like o yeah, like prosciutto s, That's prociuto. Yeah, not prosciuto. What's the word I'm looking for? Petta Pketta. You to make the Porketta sandwiches like right there. And so that's where we always go because it's by the federal Now you're making me hungry. It's dinnerert timee. I don't think you should be talking about That's the best thing in San Brand and and go up to the mission and go get a two foot paper dosa But yeah, so it's really weird because I remember one of my buddies worked at at What's the wor we the sales force back then? He was my editor when I was at Tua. He worked at Salesfce and we used to go to that building and then go grab food across the street. And so that whole area was like little pockets of tank And then it was like, oh they smart. They put it all in the financial area. So you're saying now these guys pick their buildings up and go somewhere else where they get better better rate. What wass the reason for? I'm just surprised. San Francisco has a reputation for being very expensive U You know, the big tech companies are down the peninsula in Silicon Valley where the rent is cheaper in towns like San Jose. What is it about San Francisco that makes these companies want to? Well, there's been a there's been a reset. So prices are still not cheap But u there there's been there's been an opportunity kind of in this moment Com Now Stanford lie. Yeah that the u You know, the thing is It's FOMO, right? Like peoplee want to be in the heart of the action. And right now the perception is if you're in AI, San Francisco is where the heart of the action is. The big exception to that, of course is SpaceX. They're putting But They're putting their bets on XAI and Palo Alto And of course, they can tap into Google and Meta, which are building up big AI labs, yes, and you know, in Mountain View and Menlow Park. So, you know, it's not it's not all or nothing. There's going to be some stuff in Silicon Valley. There's going to be some stuff in San Francisco. But Venture capapital too is like is setting up SF address. Yeah, if they haven't already established some kind of littleittle San Francisco outpost, there's an alley then they're going to be. There's an alley, you know, right right around the corner from us where Three venture capital offices have popped up. with like little littleittle storefront little storefront signs I'm kind of happy to see that. I left my heart in San Francisco. I love the city. It's a beautiful little fishing village I mean, it got really hammered during lockdown because mean working the city there. And it was like that was likeking through the setessive twenty eight days later, I mean very dead. Yeah ye. The world we were talking about the World Cup at the, you know, at the top of the show Um the, you know, the vibe with u with like World Cup watch parties is kind of off the hook Interesting. I'm glad to see it remember beingillboard about Mosconi and Intercontinentals and getting drinks at the chieftain. L I don't even know what's in Mosconi Center area now. Yeah, that Oh the chieapfains still there Yeah, Is just down I got to say Muscony, that area is still a little challenged. And especially like West of Muscony It was quite a helless encampment down there. There's a big drug crisis down there. Yeah, and, you know, it's just like that that kind of you know, the kind of post industrial renovated warehouse offffice space that was so popular during the dot comom boom That's the kind of office space that landlords are really having trouble filling. That's where Tch TV knows, of course. Yeah, you as you can see, like you know the offices that that Anthropic and open AI are taking, they're like new buildings, big, glassy, open Very different Oen floor plans you know, AI companies generally want new moving ready, no no kind of, you know, no kind of perks or charm, just like no charm. No history. Yeah. Yeah before we wrap up, I usually end the show with mem memorium. There are a couple of people passed in this past week that I think it deserve attention Um One is somebody that I didn't know of, but so many of my friends speak so highly of him Uh he was very instrumental in turning Austin into a tech mecca. J Joshua Ber, the founder of a small VC firm called Capital Factory died in a small plane It was an accelerator really, and it turned Austin into a real tech hub. Very many people I know just think the world of him. everybody has had very kind things to say. so there was a lot of shock in Austin After the passing of Joshua Bar, the gofather of Austin's startup scene quite tragic. he was fairly young. And then another person you might know of, you know of his company. was one of the founders of Ubisoft, Claude Guamaot passed in another plane crash, a couple of plane crashes. Uboft I didn't know this. The history of Ubisoft is kind of Interesting. they were a mail order software business that they transformed he and his brother into one of the world's largest video game companies. They also made hardware and the Guillamar Corporation made a lot of controllers for flight simulators and driving simulators and things like that. You will be missed Claude Guillo passed away in a plane crash, a couple of immemoriums. It's kind of sad to end the show with that. I should end it with something more upbeat. Happy Father's Day. Happy longest day of the year, longongest show of the year at this point. I think. And also it's Pride Month. and that was another great story you had in the San Francisco Business Times Yes, AI may be big in San Francisco, but let's not forget. it is also a very prideful Did they is the parade? did they already have the parade? No, that's a week from today. Nice. That's always a always a party in San Francisco. AI, How about gI? Thank you so much, Owen. Great to see you. Owen Thomas is the managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times And always a welcome. Hgh and Fitz are always a welcome presence on the show. Thank Thankk you for being here. We appreciate it. Thank you for putting up with this Marathon. I didn't mean to make it a marathon. You know what offtten happens that when I get people on I really like, we just can't stop talking.. Ian Thompson also a longtime friend of the show. Great to have you and Stumpy the Cat Yes, who's been using the litter boookx during the show. comp For some reason Stumpy just waits until Twit and then It's time, baby, it's time Great to see you. You will find Ian's view from the valley. In fact you could subscribe to it, whereere do they go to subscribe to it? J just go to techfinitative. com and you can log in there. Absolutely. wonderful. Techfinitive d. com look for the view from the valley Mar own Ian Thompson. And of course, Stock Rock, you'll find him Walking cockily down the hallways of ECAM saying, you can't fire me. We don't have any hallways. There's no hallways here. Plus that's in m hallways. far, far away away. What do you think we are? Anthropic? He's the director of strrategic Partnerships there Cam thank you ECM for making this show possible. We appreciate your software. It's great. You'll find them on YouTube YouTube dot com slash Doc Rock. And are you're rooting for the Netherlands, huh? Yeah, just I think they'll finally pull it off. You know you know, Leo, they said the AI supposed to make these things go by faster. someomehow you made it It made it longer Sheheese, che's Louise Oh my goodness. Ian who are you wroting for England? Actually I'm rooting for Scotland, but I think I'm going to be facing a disappointment on that one. England have got a decent game, but I think the Netherlands has got a strong chance. We'll see how France plays. Spain has been a real disappointment so far. Reallyood today though Yeah one good five to one today. it's really Netherlands, France and Argentina are probably the Okay. That sounds exciting That sounds good. And Owen, do you care You know, I I just want people to to come and buy beers and you know and hang out in downtown San Francisco.' for the city. Yeah. It's good for the city. Thank you, everybody for joining us. A spepecial thanks to our club twwit members who make this show possible, make all of our show possible With their memberships, ten bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows, plus access to the Cub Twit discord and all the special programming we do just for you in the club coming up this week. I'm excited about it. episode Technically it's episode two, but it's we're gonna call episode three of the great show with Jeff Atwood we call offff by onene. Get it. Off by onene is see? It was a little programming little proam game, prorogramming humor. Off by one, let me see what the schedule says. I think Friday comoming up yes, Friday the twenty sixth at two PM Pacific five PM Eastern Choose your own adventure with the Wild and woolly Jeff Atwood. That'll be a lot of fun. That's one of the many club shows we do. our AI user group is coming up july third. Mike' crafting Corner, the sixteenth. We had a great time on the with the media club. 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