TWiT 1075: The Commonwealth Club - Meta Layoffs, DOGE Data Theft, & the Rise of AI Fails

35:04It makes you crazy. he's a unique British politician isn't he there's something everybody loved him when he was mayor of London very popular he's kind of the Rudy Giuliani of the UK when it went the other way I do love the anecdote I do love the anecdote I do love the anecdote that his hair was perfectly done and he went out to a press conference he was hanging on a second and ruffled it all up and then went out there. It's a very carefully created image. It's a look. But yeah, he was great as mayor of London in terms of... Because London's getting a lot of stick at the moment as being a crime-ridden hellhole, despite the fact that we've got a lower murder rate than pretty much every American city.

35:54But Boris actually boosted London. And you've got too many people just going, oh, London, it's crime, it's terrible, you know. But Boris actually did a lot for the capital. Just not a lot for the country. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not a great prime minister. A great leader. She was at Twitter when Jack decided he wanted to do a little research project on kind of open social networks. Funded something that ended up becoming Blue Sky. Jay Graber took the helm. She was CEO. She's now stepping down. at Blue Sky. She's going to be the chief innovation officer. But one of the investors is going to become temporarily the CEO, Tony Schneider.

36:44But they are going to do a CEO search. I do hope they don't ruin Blue Sky. I was going to say, is that everyone's favorite now? Where are you all? What's your favorite ex-Twitter platform? Richard is shaking his head at this one. Yeah, like there's a favorite. I get a lot of the tech crowds on Blue Sky. And so I get strong responses when I'm talking about podcasts there. The real weird geeky guys are on Mastodon, but they're the only ones who can figure out how to do it. Yeah, we run a Mastodon instance, Twitter social, which you're all invited to join. And I love Mastodon. I'm a big fan of the idea of Federation.

37:24I'm going to admit kind of a dirty little secret, though, because when when when Elon bought Twitter, I got off of it immediately because I really realized that it was going to go downhill and he fired everybody. It was getting all sorts of technical issues happened. And then, of course, the Nazis came in and he brought back a lot of people who really should not have been brought back. but in this age of ai uh i have to confess i i'm reading twitter a lot these days i don't post there or x i don't post there i don't have high hopes for its future now that he has x money you saw that he gave shatner uh like 20 bucks of x money and shatner turned it into 200 000 in charity donations because he he sold apparently if you give somebody an x money which it's only in be private beta right now, but if you give somebody some money and Elon, I think Elon gave him$42, right?

38:21The magic number. And if you give somebody some money, like if you could get somebody to send you a dollar, if you get Will Shatt to send you a dollar, you would now be in the X money beta. So he was auctioning off a dollar at a time. Elon's$42 raised$200 ,000 for charity so i think that's actually pretty sharp that's pretty good anyway i it's my dirty little secret is that i do now check uh because it's it is where all the ai bros go it is one way to keep up i think maybe the best way to keep up with what's going on in a very fast moving arena i mean in one way it's good and you've got a competitive competitive social media there's no winner anymore there is no favorite right it used to be just with her now you've got blue sky you've got mastodon you've got to an extent reddit and a bunch of other songs you know you don't have anymore dig oh god this was hilarious please go on uh so uh you know i have a little bit of a you know dog in this hunt because kevin rose i worked with him of course uh at tech tv and he started dig kind of when he was there and the dignation podcast um and and uh in some ways i feel responsible for the death of dig because i was encouraging him to make the changes that ended up becoming dig 4.0 which turned out to make dig be the most gameable thing in the world alexis ohanian and steve huffman came along and said we could do a better dig and created reddit dig died because it was being gamed so badly reddit won in effect but kevin and oddly enough alexis ohanian reddit's founder restarted dig and they've been public for a few months they're shutting it down again because they say uh it's being gamed by bots wow the same reason it shut down last time uh two months after their highly anticipated return uh dig announced the site's going offline as a result of a quote unprecedented bot problem they're going to rejigger it they thought that ai would solve this that ai would keep the bots off but what they underestimated was as they did last time was how uh incentive the bots are and they're using AI too.

40:51Reddit's facing the same problem at the moment. I mean, it is bot infested. There's a Reddit thread I'm on called AskBritz. And, you know, there's a conversation about Tesla. And we got, I don't know about this. Tesla's really popular in the UK. I bought a Model S the other day, and it's really, really good. And then directly beneath it, hi, Tesla is underrated. i bought a model 3 the other day and it was just like you had to post up bad bot clumsy there's a lot of it x says it suspended 800 million accounts in 2024 over spam and 800 million i remember when twitter had 350 million total i think that was when they sold it to elon it was is uh this is what they told uk the uk it's according to the guardian um that's a problem if you're getting that many bots uh i mean kind of ruined all the social media they told parliament yeah it was continually fighting state-backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network with russia the most prolific state actor followed by iran and china makes you wonder what the the operating sites are doing or not doing yeah I mean if yes I mean X has done a lot to try to stop those bots and apparently it's done nothing in fact well here's the story from Wired a original accusation to the old uh Twitter board is that they weren't managing bots that their accounts were that was that was what his whole thing was it's a bad job clearly didn't do it Well, you could say in his defense, they banned 800 million of them.

42:42Now. Yeah. And they still allowed Stephen Laxley Yellen to get back on there. But I mean, look, this is a problem with all social media. Bots are everywhere. And there needs to be a screening mechanism, but no one's come up with one yet. Remember, of course, that the ex was home to a lot of non-consensual sexual images. and got in a lot of trouble all over the world was banned in some countries they claim to have fixed that now according to wired fake ai content about the iran war is all over x and and not only is grok failing to verify the video correctly it's creating its own images they're using grok to do it x's ai the video game war i mean right well it is look at the administration yeah horrific horrendous promo videos using video games and movies and i've never seen anything like it i don't know although i mean remember the the opening stages of gulf war one shock and awe where yeah well when you saw like smart missiles going right down into the bunker and everyone was like this is absolutely amazing now it's ai generated and it's deeply disturbing because, you know, democracy depends on information.

44:03And if it's when you've got the White House putting out AI-generated slop, that's really worrying. Well, even more worrying to me is that Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense, have shooed out all the real journalists from the Pentagon and... The BBC is still there. They've still got a seat there. Because you had to sign an agreement saying, I'm not going to say anything bad about the Pentagon to stay. They're a foreign press. So they didn't have to sign that. It was only domestic. But the BBC did actually hold him to account and said, right, OK, you said six months ago that their nuclear capability had been destroyed.

44:41And now you're saying it's been destroyed again. Can you expand on that? And it was perfect British passive aggressive. I did love them dearly for that. Well, and Hagseth has excoriated the US media for telling people bad things about the war. Like, that's their job, dude. Yeah. Now Brendan Carr is threatening to, he's doing his thing where he goes and says things and expects networks to then follow suit without actually doing any regulation. But he has said that he's going to, he's threatening to revoke the licenses of the networks that are portraying the war incorrectly. Because Trump is not being portrayed well.

45:24I mean, when I saw that, I went back to an article I'd written, what, 10 years ago, where Brendan Carr was kind of like, you know, we need free speech. We need an open platform. And now he's now he's in charge. It's just like, yeah, get out. We want free speech for us. Not you. Very much. Yeah, they even did pull a broadcast license. Nobody uses the airwaves anymore. It's right. Doesn't that it's kind of old fashioned anyway. I think these are just empty threats because Trump's mad. So he has to make the noise that Trump wants him to make. Well, they're not empty, though, because what happens is the networks do act on them because they because of what's that.

46:03That's the real problem. It's like so there's no actual regulation or enforcement happening here. They're just all running scared because their deals aren't going to go through or, you know. And the experience is when you run, you run. They come get you again. Yeah. And when you say, come at me, bro, they walk away. walk away because the mark carney example yeah i mean uh hex has said the quiet part out loud earlier this week he's just like once ellison takes over the uh of cnn then we'll see some and it was just like wow you're actually saying that you know this is how bold they are they don't have to deny it they don't have to hide it but it does speak to the idea that if you actually want to have someone who was going on the u.s you don't look at u.s media yeah well i'm I do know that the Beeb still has somebody in there.

46:50That's good. Yeah. We've been watching BBC and Sky News now because you can get a feed from both on, I think it's like free as well, like Samsung TV Plus or like all the, what are the free TV streaming services that give you all the channels? And the Sky, because the Beeb's been under a lot of scrutiny recently. Yeah, but Rupert Murdoch owns Sky, right? Yeah, Sky News has always been fairly good. I mean, I don't know, Ian, do you ever watch it? At least I can get F1 on Apple TV. That's what I care about. I mean, the thing is, Murdoch hasn't taken as heavy a hand with Sky News as he has with, for example, The Sun.

47:34The Sun, he would call the editor every day and discuss what they were going to put on the front page. Sky News has got some really good journalists. They've got some really good coverage. You know, the same thing for the Wall Street Journal. You could say the same thing for the Wall Street Journal. You know, the editorial board might have a slant, but the reporting is very good. The people are very good there. But it's harder and harder to find news that you feel confident in these days. Well, and that's why maybe the real issue with social media is that's where a whole generation gets its news now.

48:05I mean, they get their news from TikTok and Instagram. I had a bit of a retro moment. That's from people my age. although they actually get news because i remember being that age and never watching the news my daughter says you know we we if she's 32 so she's not quite in that generation but she says we use uh tiktok for search said you can't use tiktok for sure she said well ask a question how long is the golden gate bridge i said she said enter into tiktok and i found it so you you actually can't use tiktok for there's so much content on there don't ask it when tian comes with it also but you do get the answer yeah uh speaking of problems with avocado metas ai uh elon musk has been firing people at xai saying it was not built right to his satisfaction it's not built right it's interesting because you know chat gpt open ai and anthropics claude are dominating in fact the chinese uh open ais like deep seek and qn also very very good but for some reason meta and x are having trouble with their ai's getting it to do anything maybe the standard is so good um x has been losing people of the 12 people who founded the company xai in 2023 of 12 who founded the company three years ago only two are left uh last month uh some significant departures quite a few at an all-hands meeting last month musk said um these are deliberate exits some people are better suited for the early stages and less suited for the later stages electric says this is uh this is a problem you know so So X is making money in one company.

49:56Elon's making money in one company, SpaceX, losing money massively on XAI and losing money on X. So what's the solution? You put them all together and you have a SpaceX stock IPO. Catamint is a hell of a drug. Yeah, no kidding. But it's also a fairly clever movement. None of them are public companies. Not now. he gets to do what he wants yeah he took x private we took twitter private when he bought it right so you know you don't actually even know the truth which means it's probably worse than you think so i think it's a great way to hide problems right his whole plan is to take tesla space x x ai x neural link the boring company mush them all into a big ball i don't think he's going to get tesla in there because tesla is public he can't tesla's public that's right that's right so yeah you know there's there's much more regulation and trouble around all that but He's already munged the rest together.

50:52He is treating Tesla, though, as kind of a resource. He's moved AI engineers from Tesla to XAI and so forth. He's mostly borrowed against Tesla stock. He's deeply leveraged in Tesla stock. That's the nature of billionaires, right? You just borrow money against your stock, so you never have taxes. Right. It's all well-implined to you tank your stock, Russ. Yeah, I mean, we've seen this also in the rest of the industry. where you've got Oracle investing in NVIDIA to get stuff from them, a whole bunch of companies investing in NVIDIA. And then NVIDIA investing back. Exactly. It's a massive... You buy our chips with our money that we're going to give you.

51:36Well, exactly. I mean, financially, it's a Chinese military parade of red flags. You would not touch these things. And, yeah, it's going to be very interesting to see how that works out. Well, tomorrow, NVIDIA has a big, big shoe. We're going to talk about that in just a little bit. i know you're excited about that and you've been doing some prep work ian and i know uh richard campbell will also have things to say about that i said this on windows weekly it's like wow you weren't happy selling shovels so now you're going to go try and get some gold really that's right that's right going for the gold jennifer pattison too he's also here we will talk about gtc in just a little bit this week in tech brought to you this week by modulate this is actually a really cool company they started first with video gaming trying to get the abuse down in video gaming and now there's now they're expanding everyday enterprises generate millions of minutes of voice traffic customer calls uh agent conversations fraud attempts and most of that audio ends up just being treated like text it's flattened into a transcript there's no you know tone intent the risk even kind of is watered down because it's just words on paper modulate exists to change that they did it in gaming their technology supported major players like call of duty and grand theft auto there's also all that voice right going on during these massively multiplayer games they've been using their specially designed ai models to separate playful banner from intentional harm and they're doing it at scale with millions of players simultaneously today modulate is also helping enterprises including fortune 500 companies understand 20 million minutes of voice every day by not as a transcript but i but but listening to interpreting what was said and what it actually means in the real world it's a very special model it's modulates newest elm they call it and i love the name velma 2.0 with a little nod i think to scooby-doo velma that's the smart one right the one with the glasses velma is a voice native behavior this is so cool it's a voice native behavior aware model that was designed and built to understand real conversations not just transcripts it orchestrates a hundred plus specialized models each focused on a different aspect of voice analysis and the result is you get accurate explainable insights in real time you got to check this out velma ranks number one across four key audio benchmarks beating all large foundation models in accuracy cost and speed it's number one in conversation understanding because it's designed to do this right number one in transcription accuracy and cost number one you need this in deep fake detection.

54:31And number one, this is the one I really am amazed by, in emotion detection. Built on 21 billion minutes of audio, Velma is 100 times faster, cheaper, and more accurate than LLMs because it's tuned for this, right? An understanding speech. Better than Google, Gemini, OpenAI, better than XAI. Most LLMs are a black box. Velma doesn't just assess a conversation as a whole, but breaks it down for greater accuracy and transparency. It produces time-stamped scores and events tied to moments in the conversation so you can see exactly when the risk is going up, when behavior shifts, or the intent changes.

55:14You can see it right there. With Velma, you can improve your customer experiences, reduce risks like fraud and harassment, detect rogue agents, and so much more. Go beyond transcripts. See what a voice-native AI model can really do. You know what? You can actually check it out. Go to Modulate's live ungated preview of Velma. It's at preview.modulate.ai. That's preview.modulate.ai to see why Velma ranks number one in all leading benchmarks for conversation, understanding, deepfake detection, and emotion detection very cool stuff preview.modulate.ai we are entering very interesting times i have to say with that with ai very very interesting times so what well the um the uk is changing the as the bank of england is changing the faces on bank notes no more churchill on your banknotes?

56:16Yeah, but everyone said, oh, that's so woke. But at the same time, they're taking Alan Turing, famous homosexual war hero, off the 50 quid note. And I was talking with someone on Reddit about this, and it was just like, they're putting badges on the notes. It's just like, I would pay money to see Alan Turing on the back of a badger. And somebody just created an AI picture of that and posted it up. Is it very good? It's pretty damn good. I like the idea of wildlife life on your bills. I think that's kind of neat. And the British bills are very colorful, right? The bank. Oh, yeah, we have fun with it.

56:51You know, quite pretty. Here's a although now you have the Donald Trump dollar coin coming. And the so first sitting president who's actually put his name on his face on the currency. I think, though, to be fair, that is intended as regular currency. That is like, you know, a special. I was gonna say who who actually uses dollar coins right I mean I've I've got very few of them sells those it's more like um you know New Jersey yeah it's a special New Jersey transit uses the uh the coin so they they're gonna put badgers on them uh they're gonna put a whole bunch of wildlife on them um now King Charles is still on the front And presumably so.

57:34I haven't held a UK banknote for over two years. So Jennifer, sorry. I've probably got one right here, actually. I was just in Costa Rica and they have animals on their banknotes. I like that idea. I have some. They're beautiful because, and they have like a little thing. This is a UK, this is a British banknote. See how pretty that is? There's a QE2. Beautiful. And then this is whose, I don't know who that is. That's Jane Austen? I don't know. No. Oh, no. Who is that? That's a man. It's a guy. Look at our beautiful, colorless, green banknotes, right? Joseph Mallard William Turner. Oh, Joe Turner.

58:15Old Joe Turner. Sure. But the Costa Rican ones, they have like sloths and monkeys. And when you put them together like this, they have like a little, I should go get it. It's much better than bending the queen's head. But the flowers come together to form the flower of the region that you're in. It's like it's really neat kind of little Easter egg things. And their banknotes are like yellow and green and blue and much more colorful than ours. But yeah, I agree. U.S. money is really boring. It's really. But let's be fair. Who uses cash anymore? Or do you? I get cash. I go to the bank and get cash, but mostly it's for tips because I like the tip and cash.

58:56Our local Banh Mi place only takes cash. It's getting more expensive. That means they're money laundering. You know that, right? No, I'm sorry. This guy's been doing it for 30 years. He does the best Banh Mi on the planet. Well, it's probably worth it. It's a Vietnamese guy and it's a family-owned business, but they only take cash because why would you pay 2 % to 3 %? Yeah. And it's getting more and more expensive for companies to use, for retailers to use. So like when you do see this in L.A. and California, we see this in the southeast all the time. You go into a restaurant or a shop and if you pay by card, any card, even debit card, there's a 3 % charge on your bill.

59:38So that I think. And the merchant pays that. Yeah. No, but you you're paying 3 % more. You pay it. Yes. They're like, if you're going to pay by card, even debit card, your bill is going to 3 % more. to say that it's cheaper if you pay cash. The gas stations do it too. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah, no. If you buy petrol, then it's significantly cheaper to pay with cash. This is how it used to be, though, right? They used to always pass on the credit charge to the person, right? Isn't that how it used to be? Just mark everything up 3%. I mean, they may be secretly doing that, yes. But you're supposed to have this.

1:00:16I think, maybe I'm wrong, but i think i remember that you were supposed to have the same price for cash or credit that you weren't supposed to have separate prices i'm just surprised that they do it that way rather than just mark it up and say three percent discount for cash right much more positive yeah you could do yeah i just you know i don't know what cat what gas costs in your foreign lands but here in california it is six bucks a gallon in pet aluminum oh yeah oh ours just went up but it's nowhere near that yeah well we pay more in california because of tax uh yeah and also california requires that the petroleum petrol as you would say gets refined in the state which costs more well also i mean there's less pollutants but yeah sf standard had a thing they found six dollars fifty uh the most expensive gas on in san francisco it was weird because i posted a picture up you know big sur Route 1.

1:01:10If you've ever driven down there, it's a fantastic driving road, but there are only two petrol stations, and they screw you so hard. Yeah, because where else are you going to go? Yeah, exactly. So I took a picture of their gas prices, and it was$5.50. And now that just looks sweet. Oh, and by the way, on the Discord channel, Club Twit, I've just posted a picture of Alan Turing riding a badger. Well, now I've got to join the club. That's for sure. That's worth it. That's worth your club membership right there. Let me see if I can pull it up here. These English badgers are so much sweeter than North American badgers.

1:01:47North American badgers are terrifying. Badger, badger, badger. That is a beautiful image. It is. He's so small and the badger is so big. The great badger. British people of a certain age will recognize the meme, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger. What was it? And then it would go mushroom, mushroom, mushroom. Bad job, bad job. That was universal. That was worldwide. Bad job, bad job, bad job. Here is a picture of our local gas station. Regular is$5.99. Plus is$6.99. V power is$6.39. That's a Shell station. Time to go electric. I thought, you know, someday we'll look back and say, wow, it's only$6 a gallon.

1:02:32A mere. Single digits? Wow. What happened to me? Jennifer is a Brit. As a fellow Brit, you can understand this. When I first came over here and I was talking to the taxi driver on the way back from the airport about British petrol prices, he was like, hang on, you're paying$11 a gallon? I was about to say it's a lot more expensive in England. Yeah, exactly. They hide it, though, by putting it in litres. Yes, it's harder to tell. It's harder to tell. It took me a while to figure out that. I was like, oh, wow, it's a bargain here. And down here in the south, it's$3.50 right now. But like a month ago, it was$2.70.

1:03:07So we've had a huge, like overnight, two weekends ago, it went up. And of course, those prices. It wasn't 270 in California since like 20 years ago. Yeah, we haven't seen 270 in ages. But it all trickles down too, because truckers, all the food you have, you eat everything. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know what the price is because I pay with electricity. Yeah, me too. I'm all electric. Look. So tomorrow, NVIDIA will begin GTC, its annual conference, and Jensen Wong will do the keynote. We will be covering it. Jeff Jarvis, Micah Sargent, and I will be turning on our cameras at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m.

1:03:47Eastern, 1900 UTC to, I'm sorry, 1800 UTC to show Jensen's leather jacket. And apparently, they're going to have some, I think they're going to have some big announcements. I think this is really maybe the most important GTC keynote ever uh videos of course in the cutting edge of uh of ai development one of the things that they're going to announce is nemo claw which is an ai agent like open claw but they say will be more secure um they've been talking about this i think for a while i think this is a big surprise but we haven't seen it yet and well it's not hard to be more secure than open clog i know they also they also say that will not require CUDA which is of course uh and NVIDIA's proprietary language it requires an NVIDIA GPU which means I guess you'll be able to run it on non-NVIDIA hardware we'll see the NVIDIA hardware is actually appreciating in value I saw a story you could buy H100 cards they're old GPUs but they cost more than they did three years ago when they came out so if you invested better than buying two dollar bills buy nvidia gpus they also according to the wall street journal uh plan to reveal a new chip system for inference computing that will incorporate a chip designed by grok not grok elon's grok with the k with the q nvidia licensed the design from them last year so they just announced the new platform the vera Rubin platform a few months ago.

1:05:28So they're moving very, very fast. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what Jensen announces. You're going to watch that, right, Ian? You said you were... Yeah, no, I was out with some analysts last night, and they were talking about this. And NVIDIA has really got to take the market by the throat at this point, because its stock is massively overvalued. NVIDIA is the Straits of Hormuz of AI. That's a very... I might steal that, actually. But I mean, on one level, it's kind of like everyone's waiting for the bubble to pop. And what's going to happen to NVIDIA when that happens? So I think NVIDIA is getting its defense in first.

1:06:14And some of these new announcements look really, really good. But I think fundamentally talking to people in video and talking to the analysts behind it, there's going to be a bubble bursting and then they take over and try and salvage something from the wreckage. But they're actually in a pretty good position. The open source AI agent in particular is getting a lot of attention because it's like, okay, you're actually opening this up and that's going to bugger up some of their commercial competition. But they're willing to do it. say the frontier AIs are still ahead by a long shot. There's nothing like Claude.

1:06:56In fact, one of the things Anthropic announced this week is Opus 4.6, their frontier model, now has a million token context window up five times from its 200 ,000. That means it can ingest much more data and work on it without choking. That's a huge leap. Nothing close with the open platforms. I'm with you. I think we need open platforms. I think they're really important. We don't want a handful of companies to dominate this. Go ahead, Richard. Yeah, you used to have to pay a premium to get the million thing. I have a bunch of friends who pay for a number of Macs accounts because they're software developers.

1:07:37They're literally running these things against each other. and a bunch of them are paying the premium for the million and now they've opened it up which to me you know anthropic so far ahead on the efficiency equation that i think they're finding out okay we can make this make economic sense too i think that must be it they also announced that they're going to give you a double the usage at off peak hours so they you know everybody's been talking about and maybe they're doing this at a great loss i don't know uh ed zitron and others are talking about how much Anthropic is losing on every single token they sell.

1:08:14I don't know if that's the case. We just don't know how much it costs. And we argue about the max accounts can't continue because, you know,$200 a month and all you can eat is kind of nuts. It's not exactly all you can eat. You can run out, but I have not. I paid 200 bucks because I get that much value out of it. I find it. And I have friends who, if it was a thousand, they'd be paying too. Like they are knocking it. Well, that's what I'm afraid of. I think they're hooking me. And we're back to social media. Social media. Honestly, I probably would pay more because I'm so tied into the ecosystem.

1:08:48I briefly, when ChatGPT54 came out, I thought, oh, I got to try this. This is supposed to be better. Codex is supposed to be better. And I got to try it. And I moved everything over. And I felt like I was breaking up with my girlfriend. It was very difficult. But the thing is issue with the token limit issue is one of the things we're doing, very heavily in software is breaking down into small pieces to stay under the token limits. Right. Because we get better quality. A, if you overflow, you have problems anyway. But in general, people are well even under the quarter million because you get better quality code when you take a smaller byte.

1:09:26All I know is I have a little progress bar as I'm working that shows how much of the context I've used. And it used to fill up pretty quickly. When you get to more than 60 70 you really want to compact it and you know save what you've learned because every time you clear the context window yeah it's like you knocked all his brains out and start hello who are you it starts from scratch so it's like the guy in memento you know he doesn't remember anything so uh you kind of want it you save notes you say okay i'm going to compact the memory now i'm going to so remember what we were doing and then you kind of have to start up again it has to read in and so forth.

1:10:05But now I can't, I mean, I'm looking at that bar. It doesn't move. It's like, it's amazing. It's very hard to fill up a million tokens. The question, Leo, is what is this worth to you then? How much, what's the absolute limit you would pay for this? What will you pay? Don't test me. That's all I'm saying. No, but does that square with how much Anthropik spends on it? Because that's the arithmetic that needs to work. First of all, we don't know how much it costs them. And there is definitely some efficiencies that they're gaining obviously uh well for instance nvidia said the vero ruben platform is i forgot what it was but it was a significant like 10 times less cost than their h200s i mean they made they're making massive improvements in efficiency uh we just don't know we don't know if it's a money loser or or what i mean that's always been the contention is that for 200 bucks a month you're getting thousands of dollars but anthropic seems to be the company accelerating away like They are.

1:11:01They're dropping new things out. This was always a conversation early on was like, what happens when these companies use their own tools to improve their tools? And that's what they're doing. And that's what we're seeing. And more so than any other, they seem to be suddenly accelerating away from everyone. Well, I mean, it's also kind of a grudge match because Anthropic was founded by people that looked at OpenAI and went bugger that, we're doing our own thing. And they're stealing the march on them at the moment. They really are. I mean, with OpenAI in particular just dying on its backside amongst users because of the political stances they've taken, Anthropic is saying, looking at that and going, yeah, let's get in there.

1:11:43Here's an interesting story. I'm very curious what you think about this. You are, of course, familiar with Perplexity. They have shopping bots on Perplexity. you can say i want to buy some running shoes trainers in your parlance and i have to remember we're doing foreign language programming now and uh and so you want to buy some or maybe you want to buy a jumper sweaters as we call them and uh which you know what jumper is a much more civilized way to talk about it than sweater more aussie too yeah uh yeah so let's say you're shopping for a bicycle you call it a bicycle right so you're shopping for a bicycle and perplexity it will then show you a bunch of sites you can even say buy me a bicycle you could say perplexity do the research get me the best running shoes money can buy your budget is 200 bucks or whatever and it will buy them well amazon didn't like that too much uh this is using the perplexity browser comet which is agentic amazon didn't like that too much they sued last november demanding that they stop making purchases for users online this week a judge ruled in favor of amazon it's a temporary injunction but they said that perplexities comet can no longer buy stuff from amazon's website judge i'm sorry chesney doesn't undermine amazon's model of selling you their stuff right well it underlines a couple of things amazon also has ads on their site right they make a huge amount of money from the ads uh but they also yeah amazon recommends amazon suggestives and you don't see any of that if you're using a bot you don't see amazon's site if you're using a bot the judge said amazon has provided strong evidence that perplexity's comet browser accessed its website at the user's direction but without authorization from amazon when did i have to get authorization to use a website yeah as a human do i have to get authorization well i mean i guess I'm sorry.

1:13:50I was going to say their argument probably is you have to have an account, right, to buy something on Amazon. It's on the internet. Well, but I presume that Comet is using my money with my account. And that's where the argument falls down. It's like you've given it authorization. So, yeah, they don't have. And the irony here is this is exactly what Amazon is trying to do with Alexa Plus. Exactly. And Rufus, which very few people know about. But Amazon has an AI agent on its site, and they want you to use Rufus. Although, in a related story, Amazon had an all-hands with its engineers who they said, you can't use Claude.

1:14:30You have to use Cairo, our in-house AI, to do your engineering. They had an all-hands saying, you cannot use any of our code that you've produced with Cairo without getting a senior engineer to sign off on it. because apparently it's been causing some problems. They now deny. Well, they had that massive outage. They deny. First they said it was caused by AI. Now they're saying, oh, no, no, no, it wasn't AI. I've got a bridge I could sell you if you believe that. They say, please don't use our AI to solve your technical problems. Yeah, I mean, don't you, when I'm using Chrome and I go to Amazon and I'm buying something, I'm using Chrome to buy something on my account with my permission.

1:15:19How is that different? I think the judge got this wrong. Yeah, and this is something that our esteemed editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel at The Verge, has been hammering on about AI agents since day one. He calls it the DoorDash problem, which is that basically the whole point of agentic AI AI is to circumvent the Amazon or the DoorDash, like the place where you're going to go to buy the thing or the Uber. So that service is no longer going to get users coming to it, just like news organizations are no longer getting users coming to it because AI is just summarizing their information and spitting it out.

1:15:59If you can do everything with AI, what happens to the services that you're using because you are no longer using them yourself and these agentic tools are going there for you. And this is like what Rabbit was trying to do. This is what all of, yeah, this is what all of, this is sort of the goal of a lot of the current agentic AI out there. And Alexa Plus, I'm sure with Gemini and there's, they just actually, I did drop this link in the show notes, but Gemini just launched this week on the new Samsung device. You can use task automation with Gemini. So you can get Gemini to order your Uber, or they launched with Uber and one other feature.

1:16:49This is on the new S26 Ultra. Yes, it's just there now, but eventually I'm sure we'll see it go to all of the phones that support Gemini. So what happens to them? How many different AI agents on your Samsung phone? You've got Bixby, right? They don't discriminate Samsung. They're open to everyone. But it is only a temporary injunction, right? It is. Is this a case? Is it causing harm? Yeah, yeah. They'll probably lose on the actual case. I hope so. Well, because it blows the whole thing up if they do. Although the judge said the court finds Amazon has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim.

1:17:29Amazon said, they kind of admitted what we've been saying, that perplexities agents, first they said, well, it's a security risk because it can act using private customer accounts without requiring a password. But then they admitted it. They said perplexities agents created challenges for the company's advertising business. Because when AI systems generate ad traffic, the impressions have to be. We have to figure out if it's an AI before we can bill the advertisers. This requires modification. Amazon's entire business model. It's a flawed business model, dude. The system adaptations are necessary to maintain contractual obligations with advertisers who pay only for legitimate human impressions.

1:18:17Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting case because it is what goes to the core of what's going to happen. I mean, no one's sad about Amazon. but we are sad about our news websites that no longer get any traffic to them so eventually we'll shut down and we will no longer have originally reported news and ai will just have to make up more stuff um because there won't be any original content out there um and we are you know we are sad like we're seeing different like smaller businesses that manage to do well on the internet um you know getting disintermediated and that that type of thing is what AI is, I mean, AI is coming for everyone's jobs as we keep being warned.

1:18:57In fact, there's a great piece in The Verge this week about people whose jobs are going to be lost by AI. But AI is going to completely change the internet and completely change the business models of every website out there. So, I mean, Amazon, like I said, no boo-hoos here for them, but we've got to start the fight somewhere. I mean, there's... I mean, you're right. And the same thing happened to restaurants and it's been really hard on restaurants uh you know that without asking the restaurant's permission companies like i was at uber eats or doordash are doordash did that they would sign up restaurants without their permission and take a commission from it yeah um you know so i understand if i were a small restaurant owner or my son for instance who is a small restaurant owner in New York.

1:19:47Those guys could kill you. Imagine, you know, all of a sudden you get an order for a hundred French dip sandwiches, you know, and you've got customers waiting in the store, but you've got to fulfill these customers' orders and you didn't even sign up for it. I mean, this is what Amazon did to literally every brick and mortar store. That's a good point. You started at Amazon. It's a very, very good point. Yeah. Come to think of it. I wasn't even thinking about that. Let's see. All right, let's take a break, and then we will talk more about Doge and the amazing Doge deposition videos. Wow. Wow. Great panel.

1:20:31This is fun. And we're moving along, Jennifer, because we're going to get you. The Oscars start soon, and we're going to get you out. I've been peeking at the dresses. There's some good ones. Yes, right now it's red carpet time. You want to be an hour late anyway, so when you skip the ads, you basically catch up to live once you've skipped all the ads. I know. It's kind of like an American football game in that respect, you know, skip over the ads. And this is what really makes me mad about social media. Forget all this about making our kids crazy. I get spoiled. I don't want to see any spoilers because it's coming across and it's on my phone, it's on my watch, it's everywhere.

1:21:06Oh my God, you see this? Exactly the same problem last night. the chinese grand prix ran at midnight and i had to turn my phone off turn everything to make sure i didn't get spoilers you know by the way are we not loving the new era of formula one ian i am iffy about it oh it's so exciting no i'm you see i'm sorry i'm i've been watching formula one for 40 years and in my mind when you're right when you're driving a formula one car it's balls to the floor go as fast as you can and now you've got to recharge the battery it's more like mario kart a lot of drivers have said it's exactly like mario kart because if you charge the battery enough you get a magic mushroom and you go no one to let the banana go absolutely yeah yeah no it is it's much more complicated but you know what this is a generation of drivers they're all like 20 that grew up on mario kart they've played you know this is this this is a video game to them yeah i mean i think this is why we're going to lose max verstappen by the end of the season because he's just not enjoying it at all yeah because i'm winning at all this is one of the reasons i like it is because three plus g's in these turns like you oh yeah your weight to the to the drive day like it's really you've got a 30 pound helmet on your head as well which is being forced to the side so yeah i have the hands device so they they need those things but you know the reality is we haven't been going faster for a long time because you can't keep the driver safe yeah like true true i mean a long time ago they could be 300 mile an hour cars just everybody would die oh that's interesting yeah well that's it's much safer than it used to be much well yeah i mean it's it's kind of like the group b rally series in the 80s where they basically said you know let's take all the regulations out and yeah a lot of drivers got killed yeah yeah exactly do you like apple's uh new uh i the thing i'm still using added a lot of ads all of a sudden there's ads on f1 which i don't like at all i paid a lot more money though for the f1 tv subscription so i guess that's well i mean f1 tv i think was about 90 bucks a year last year and i'm fine with that if it means no adverts and i can get the british commentators i'm i'm down with that yeah we still the good news is we still get the f1 tv commentators you still get crafty if you want crafty and crafty's losing a bit but i do like martin brundle no one can do a fast lap like martin brundle i like the scottish guy david cluthard he has oh yeah on the on the main feed dc is fantastic you know and he's he's very sarky uh when you get um nika rossberg doing commentating highly recommend it yeah Because he is snarky as all hell.

1:23:51And I do like his commentary. I'm sorry. We got started talking about it. Sorry, yeah. Never start us on F1. Ian and I will go on and on and on. All right. We're going to take a break. Come back. Let's talk about Doge when we come back. Jennifer Patterson-Tui, who has Costa Rican money. Did you have a good time in Costa Rica? I'm so jealous. Oh, it was amazing. You recommended it. I want some tips. It was our 20th wedding anniversary. and we had gone there. Thank you. We had gone there for our honeymoon. So we came back and we brought our kids with us to the exact same place. And it was the Osa Peninsula.

1:24:28It's like the remotest part of Costa Rica you can get to really. It's funny because I know many people go there, but everybody has a different reason for going. You have the Atlantic, you have the Pacific, you have the jungle. It's all different things. Yeah. This is like the rainforest. So we were deep in the jungle. So it was like boomers and monkeys and toucans and coaties and everything. We saw all the wildlife in the house, actually. You know, we were in a house, like an Airbnb, but it had no walls. Okay, I don't like that. Okay. We did that once in Mexico. We got what they call a palapa.

1:25:02And when I saw that the whatever monkeys had nibbled the soap, I said, we're moving. I'm not staying here. But to be fair, our firstborn was like six months old. So I didn't want them to nibble our six month old. Yeah. Yeah. I can understand. But it was, it was like, it was like being in. That is wild. They were coming in the house. Yeah. And the raccoons came in the house. Oh no. Which, which they warned us this. And I said to my husband, well, there's like one part of the house that's like a big, almost like a safe with a big heavy door. So they, they put all the like. That's a sign. In there.

1:25:39And I was like, we should put the food in there and the trash. And so he diligently one night packed everything into there and then forgot to shut the door. Oh, no. The raccoons are not so dumb, are they? One raccoon came and then five more. He's like, he went and got his, the rest of his family. Hey, guys, they forgot to close the door. Come on. And the raccoons in Costa Rica are not like the ones in the US, which, interesting side note, are apparently becoming domesticated, which is very interesting. But the ones in Costa Rica are huge. and this one stood up on its back, on its hind legs, because I went down to shoo them away, and it stood up at its hind legs and it was as tall as me.

1:26:18What? And I'm 5 '10". What? Yeah, they're big. These are Cotamundis, right? They were not. No, no, it was an actual raccoon, but I know what you mean about it. It almost looked like a cross between the Cotis and the raccoons. It was that big? Yeah, on its hind legs. Yeah, I was like, hmm. Oh, that's terrifying. You can have the bread. did it try to wash you no I mean as a fellow Brit I find trash pandas absolutely terrifying because they have no fear whatsoever you know it's just like if you see them on the street they're just like stand up on the hind legs and go yeah you want some you know I mean oh my god I mean urban raccoons bulk up to fight dogs and they're quite assertive yeah I live in bear country you simply do not need anything edible outside.

1:27:10Like, no, stop. They will go through it all. Well, I should have known this palapa in Mexico, the bed didn't have feet. It was hanging from the ceiling. And that should have been a giveaway. That there was something that might crawl up a bed leg. And so we're just going to hang it from the ceiling. I've got to say, the bear thing does terrify me because I went camping up in the Sierras and my wife woke me up in the middle of the night just because there were bears prowling around our tent. And, you know, we'd done the thing. We'd put the food in a bear box and the rest of it. But she's just like, isn't that amazing?

1:27:44It's like, there are two thin layers of nylon between me and huge, sharp, pointy teeth. Oh, yeah. Not something I'm enjoying. And they like toothpaste, too. Don't bring the toothpaste in your tent. Oh, that I haven't heard. I mean, the thing the guide told us was, if it's brown, lay down. If it's black, attack. and it's just like I know I'm going to die thinking well it's kind of brown is it a blue dress is it a black dress I don't know my husband was a fishing guide in Alaska for four summers and he once was cleaning fish on the end of a dock and um a one a huge big brown bear who had hurt poor came onto the dock it was like oh you look like a big fish would you like Did you like dinner?

1:28:35Yeah, thankfully he had a radio on him, but the bear was going right for him. He knew who he wanted. Yeah, so they're pretty scary creatures. They're great to view from a distance, a very safe distance. Richard's quite the fisherman. I mean, I had a... I've lived with him my whole life, so I'm not that anxious about it. But you don't mess with brown bears. I think brown bears are serious business. An old schoolmate of mine worked on Svalbard in the Arctic Circle for a couple of years. and then you're not a whole other yeah exactly you're you're not allowed out of the town unless you've got a gun on you because they will you know polar bears are just like oh crunchy well and it's also a big deal if you do shoot a polar bear like that's your mistake like we did the expedition out of svalbard and it's like yeah checked very carefully there was no bear around because they're in danger and if you shoot one now you have a lot of paperwork to do wow yeah Wow We're going to take a little break You can't get your head around how big a polar bear is I'm not sure I want to Oh no As big as a kutamundi They yank whales out of the water Yeah Yes David Attenborough had a marvelous Series on the Life in Ice thing Where yeah they're literally hanging Around where the whales will come up to Breathe and then just pour in Rip them out Yeah we've got food yeah snack time the only time polar bears are fun to look at is when they're so stuffed full of whale they can't even move now they're on the money uh we are uh talking to uh the commonwealth version of this week in tech richard campbell from madera park british columbia in thompson he's visiting san francisco but he really is an irishman well irishman scots please scots i thought you said ireland i know i always thought you were scots no no i'm half scott and half yorkshire which makes me the tightest person on the planet but um jennifer will understand there's only one type cheaper than the yorkshireman and that's a scott yes well this is how this is how copper wire was invented two yorkshiremen fighting over a penny ah wow and jennifer pattison toey from the verge great to have all three of you here our show today brought to you by monarch i know i'm not supposed to talk about competition when i talk about monarch but i gotta tell you my subscription uh recently okay i bought a year uh by a year every year and i subscribed and i bought a year and i so my subscription came up and i thought well i really ought to look around and see what's out there and i i literally spent a morning installing all the other guys.

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1:34:04Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes money management simple. Use code TWIT at monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50 % off at monarch.com, code TWIT. There was no question in my mind, Monarch is worth every penny. I love Monarch. So, of course, the big story this week was a whistleblower that says one of the Doge engineers in the Social Security database copied records from 500 million people. That's more than there are in the United States. So I guess 500 million records maybe. He possessed two databases from the Social Security Administration, Numident and the Master Death File.

1:34:51the whistleblower said the person asked for help transferring the databases from a thumb drive to his personal computer so he could quote sanitize the data before using it at a company he was going to he is currently employed this is exactly what we were worried about to be honest when these kids these 20-somethings got brought into government um the social security inspector's general office is investigating this it is it is a credible story um and and the guy who took 500 million records for i guess living and dead americans that's why there's so many of them includes social security numbers places and dates of birth citizenship race ethnicity parents names and we know who it is because it's been revealed and we know he went to a company that works with the social security he had essentially unrestricted god-level security access to the social security administration systems these are databases that until now have been treated as highly secure highly private the government expects us to give them all the information every year when we file our tax returns in return we expect them to keep it private yeah how's that working out yeah i mean it's just like you let a bunch of i mean we'll talk about this later but you look at the people that were behind this and you know it's just like they would instantly take this because it's a fantastic data why wouldn't you um but yeah i mean the fact also that they ask for help about this shows hey can you help me yeah i i can't figure out how to get this into my personal laptop yeah i just it boggles the mind it really does most of this data was in m365 government ah the main thing these kids ah was they got the admin accounts Yeah, they got got accounts.

1:37:07Yeah, they called them got accounts. So they got admin access, which means they literally had drive-level access to everything. They may or not be able how to utilize the data or anything, but you've got drive-level access, so copy everything. Wired got the identification. I won't say the person's name on the show, but he is now the chief technology officer at Leidos because Leidos works with the social system. They have a$1.5 billion five-year deal working with the Social Security Administration. He's denying everything, of course. Of course. I feel like the problem is, you know, every week I get another letter from another company saying that my Social Security number and every other thing I've given them has been exposed.

1:37:55It's like, whose Social Security number is not in the wrong hands these days? It's like we need to have a complete sort of reset on how we handle or what data actually becomes is essential to recognize and identify us. I saw another article this week about something like an absurd number of tax returns have been filed using fraudulent data. So people and it's quite common, I hear, to like log in to do your taxes if you use an online service and be like, oh, you've already filed. Oh, no. No. That's not good. Yeah. So, like, we've lost control. Well, then that was what Doge was supposed to fix, right?

1:38:35Doge was supposed to fix fraud. The sad truth of it is, you know, Elon said it was going to save the government$2 trillion. It saved very little money. It actually cost more money than it saved, yes. And that's actually the cause for this lawsuit by the Modern Language Association. the american council of learned societies the american historical association they're suing the national endowment for the humanities because their grants were cut by doge hundreds of millions of dollars with grants were cut by doge and in this lawsuit uh the doge kids were brought in to testify now uh the mla posted that on youtube and a judge immediately said uh yeah no that's a deposition you that's confidential you can't post it uh but of course once it's on youtube too late man it's no i mean 404 did a fantastic job on this yeah and i feel for joe cox i've known for a while and but they actually had somebody sit through six hours of this testimony and go through with it and the guy some of these guys there's a germans have a word for everything and there's a German word forgive me for this but it's which is a face made for punching and my goodness I looked at that and it was just like this guy was like no we just fed it into chat GPT and it told us whether it was DEI or not so we just deleted it and it's like that's people's lives here he is trying to explain what DEI is there was the EO explicitly laid out the details I don't remember it off the top of my head it's okay i'm asking for your understanding of this yeah my understanding was exactly what was written in the video yeah he says i don't know what dei is but i know it when i see it right they were basically they were if it if if a a grant was uh application mentioned a black person a tribal person a native american uh lbgtq it was in there they would just cancel the grant period that was it yeah it was basically a word search i know it means he was just searching for the string exactly i don't know what it means i just know what i'm told even the word diverse was in that so like even when diverse even stuff like ei we need a diversity equity inclusion even like we need a diverse set of evidence stuff like that even got so it wasn't even connected to anything racial or anything like that i was i was talking about this with my next door neighbor um Because there's a younger guy than Justin Fox who was also deposed.

1:41:21And she's a teacher. And she was just like, I know those kids at school. They think they know it all and they know bugger all. They were kids. Yeah. And I'm not surprised they stole the data because why wouldn't you? You know, it's like you've got access to that database. It almost don't even blame them. I blame the people who put them in there. Yeah. That's who you blame. What's the German word? You've got it up on the screen now. I can't pronounce it because it's German. And I can speak a little French, but not German. So it's basically a compound word meaning to punch someone and their face.

1:42:01So it's a face made for punching. Yeah, it's hard to say. I've tried to learn German for a couple of years and I just can't do it. Backfeif means punch or slap on the cheek or face. And gesicht means face. So, yeah. Slappable face. There's a reason there are no great German love poets, put it that way. It isn't exactly a romantic language.

1:42:29Let's see. What else? We're talking about things government is doing that we don't like. How about this? Texas has banned lab-grown salmon because

1:42:46Texans have, quote, a God-given right to know what's on their plate. And for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. So it's poisoned by pollutants. It's got heavy metals in there, but no lab-grown stuff is just, you know. Well, that's a reason to ban it. Okay, but I think you could... Oh, no, yeah, the lab-grown stuff doesn't have that. No, exactly. If you catch a salmon in the river, God knows what's gone into it. If it's lab-grown, you know exactly what's gone into it. A California company called Wild Type, they sell lab-grown salmon. It's never salmon that never swam or anything.

1:43:27It's just they take cells and they roam, right? Yeah. And they're suing Texas because Texas bans sell cultivated meat. The company's founder says lab-grown salmon eliminates the mercury microplastics and antibiotic contamination typically found in seafood. Has anybody tasted lab-grown meat? Yeah, I've done lab-grown meat. Honestly, it tastes pretty much the same. I mean, it even bleeds because they put beetroot juice in there. Stop doing that. That's disgusting. I mean, we probably need to start growing more things like this. Well, that's right. Because, you know, our resources, I mean, salmon, they're still fairly, I mean, after one, really, they were close to extension a few decades ago, but they brought them back.

1:44:18But then things like beef, you know, the resources that they use to - Oh, forget data centers. Cows. Take a lot of water. More of this, not less. And the quote at the end of this article that from my least favorite governor of all time is that we're fighting back against the global elites plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a Petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals. I'm like, what? What? What? Authoritarian goals. By the way, people might think since we were talking about Texas, you're talking about Governor Abbott. But it's actually Ron DeSantis you're talking about. Yeah, I live very close to Florida.

1:45:03My parents lived in Florida. There's a band in Florida and Texas. Yeah. Ron DeSantis is one of the, yeah. Anyway, I won't get too political. But yeah, this is insane. This makes no sense to say this is the global elite's plan. Why would the global elite want to force people to eat lab-grown meat? What is the point here? Is it to get rid of farming? Is that the point? No. The same people who brought you COVID vaccines. The global elite. We have a global food crisis. And if we can create another way to develop nutritious, healthy food. Without killing an animal. Without killing an animal. Without ingesting toxins and plastics ourselves.

1:45:43Yeah. And they're not talking about saying like, you can't eat real salmon. But, you know, having alternatives is. That's the thing. Why ban it? Right. Well, no. It's already labeled. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Leo, you're up in Petaluma, which is a big chicken farming country. And if you go downwind of a chicken farm, my God. And yeah, same thing with the beef feed lots. I would welcome that lab-grown meat. We call it here the Sonoma aroma. Really? Oh, my God. Here's another one that makes me mad. So apparently there is now, and I bet you would know about this, Jennifer. you can get plug-in solar panels.

1:46:28They're very, you don't have to install them on your roof. You could put them on your deck, on your garage, and they plug in and then they power your house. They're popular in Germany. More than 1.2 million of the systems are registered with the German government. They are not legal in the U.S. Except in Utah. Oh, Utah. Good for you, Utah. Utah has the first law supporting plug-in solar. Finally, utiles ahead of the game. But of course, utilities don't want you generating your own electricity. And so it's illegal. State lawmakers are now in 30 states talking about making plug-in solar legal. Have you played with this at all, Jennifer?

1:47:14Do you know anything about it? Yeah, well, it's actually very common in Europe. In fact, last time I visited England, I was at my aunt's house and they had literally found a solar panel in a dump. and resurrected it and plugged it into their house and were powering some lights on their porch because these can't necessarily power your entire home. These are small arrays that you could just power, like your refrigerator, if the power's gone down, or you could power a small apartment maybe. So the roof balcony solar is kind of what was the original kind of trend in Europe is that, you know, if you have a small apartment and you just want to power a few things, you can just hang solar off your balcony.

1:47:59And it's a way of bringing solar to people that live in apartments as well, because you can't, you know, right for so long, solar is really limited to someone if you own your own home and you've got to spare 20 grand to install them. And it's a complicated process. My colleague, Thomas Ricker at The Verge, who's in Denmark. No, the Netherlands. Amsterdam. He lives in Amsterdam and he tests a lot of this type of plug-in solar or portable solar. And it's a great thing to be able to have a backup source that is not the grid without having to invest a huge amount of money. I mean, I've got solar panels.

1:48:39I think, Leo, you have solar panels, don't you? I do, yeah. Yeah. And it's great if you can have it. But they're hugely expensive. I think we spent tens of thousands of dollars on them. And the utilities are pushing against this for safety reasons, they say. But obviously, a significant issue for them is they don't want people generating their own power. Although there are some utilities who we're seeing sort of the flip side, because we are seeing a real surgence of VPNs, like virtual power networks. So where utilities can actually tap into people who are generating their own energy and storing it in batteries in order to help stabilize the grid.

1:49:21So I think we're kind of at a tipping point with the grid in America. And I can imagine, whilst we've seen resistance to this type of technology today, I would have thought, you know within the next five to ten years as more and more electric utility companies start to realize the value and benefit of being able to kind of spread the generation of energy and not just have to rely on large power plants not that small little solar panels like this are going to help but just solar panels in general in people's homes batteries in people's homes and we actually see we've seen an uptick of people installing batteries without solar panels just so that they have a resource, like instead of a generator, you've got...

1:50:04Yeah, they can time shift. And the time of use rates. So I think we're going to start, this is going to start to be a big trend. I think they're fighting it. If there's an upside to the gas crisis, the oil crisis, that might be it. If energy price for fossil fuels gets so high, renewables get much more. You can get your solar panels shipped in, they don't have to go through the Straits of Hormuz. But it's, I mean. Utility companies are worried because it's always hot. Right. And anyway, they raised a lot of safety concerns. Backfeeding is an issue, but backfeeding is also testable. Well, and they point out there have been millions of systems installed in Germany, and there have been no safety instance reported at all.

1:50:48And the UL is doing, they're doing certification for these systems. And I think that's sort of going through tweaks. But eventually it should be. I mean, I think there's a lot of fear mongering and maybe scare mongering right now. But ultimately, there's this solution could be applied to. And it's great to be. I mean, instead of having a AC unit sticking out your window, you know, you can hang some solar panels and power your fan in the house. Part of the problem is that in California anyway, our power companies are private industries, and their business really is building power plants and then selling.

1:51:28PG &E are just the scum of the, sorry, I shouldn't be so quiet. They've raised rates so many times in the last two years. Well, we've just got another fee this month. But I mean, they're really worried about this because, as Jennifer pointed out, if you've got local power things, local power systems sorted out, that kind of takes their entire modus operandi away. I've just started cert training with the fire department here, and they're saying get solar because, you know, when the electricity goes out, you're on your own and you need an independent power supply. and you know if the electricity goes out across the state after a major earthquake there's going to be no gas pumps working so if you've got an electric car get yourself so when you require solar panels on residential now like you're on new residential yeah you have to get a permit to not put solar panels oh that's great i love hearing yeah with new builds then yeah sorry and if you want to buy if you if you if you're interested in this i mean you could technically do this where even if you're not in a state that allows it because it doesn't require any permitting you just have to make sure that no one can buy one but you can buy them so ecoflow actually sells a diy balcony solar system that you can go and buy right now i really like this i might i have a balcony it's called stream series we had uh there it is i have to correct it because we did we had i think 60 solar panels on our old house and two tesla batteries but we moved and we don't have any now and we don't have any batteries now and i feel naked to be honest with you i actually just got a whole system installed that i'm going to test so i'm going to start covering the ecoflow smart panel and ecoflow batteries i'm testing we're putting that in here too you are okay well the whole point with that with the smart panel is you get to pick what breakers essentially go on battery so there's no back feeding risk because when the battery is feeding it that breaker's not on the main panel anymore.

1:53:29So the panel feeds the battery and then the battery feeds the breakers. So that eliminates the backflow. Yeah, but they switch between them. Okay. So the point being like when power goes out here, not that unusual. I'm basically living in the wilderness. There's some things you just don't want to power, right? You don't want to power baseboard heat. Use the fireplace. Like that's not necessary. So those breakers are literally marked as - But your refrigerators, you definitely want - Keep that one going, right? Keep some lights going, like that kind of stuff. That's where all the bear meat is. yeah let the stove let the stove go you're going to cook on the on the on the cast iron right yeah and this is a review from last year that thomas ricker did but it's on the verge ecoflow um so so you can get them now so that's you can buy the the balcony ones yeah you just only technically legally allowed to use them in utah but um but yeah because the permateen and all of that with solar is one of the biggest you know pains along with the price not a small problem and that was we had we bought it from solar city which is now a tesla company and you actually we had a power purchase agreement it was kind of a crazy thing it's amortized over 20 years and the whole thing when we moved it was a big pain we had a kind of the new owners had to take over the agreement it was just kind of a mess it's really added some couple months to your sale but the idea here of just being able to plug it into an outlet rather than having a regular literally just into an outlet instead of hooking it all up into your electrical system.

1:54:54So you don't need an inverter or anything, or that's in the panel. And then you could plug it into one of EcoFlow's backup battery power things too. So you could then have, you know, you could power anything from that. They have their big portable batteries with lots of outlets and plugs in. And so if you plug the solar into that, you can charge the battery and then from the battery you could charge anything in your house so it'd be great for um you know for areas where you have frequent power outages i mean i live in the south where we have hurricanes um which is one of the reasons we wanted to try testing this system because i'm now technically my own little micro grid so if when i generate enough power um i can run and i get a little alert on the ecoflow app it says oh you're off grid it's like i love that feeling isn't that Yeah, when we had the Tesla power walls, it was great.

1:55:48Every once in a while, or we'd be feeding power back into the grid, which is also cool. They don't let you do that anymore. Well, I mean, you can, but they don't give you any money for it. They'll pay you for it. So that's why batteries are much more attractive now. When you generate more energy, just save it for yourself and use it later. We're thinking about that in ourselves just to, you know, because the power goes out occasionally. But if there's a bad situation, then it's nice to have that power in-house. Yeah. You know, Australia's got the highest percentage, especially southeastern Australia, of residential solar.

1:56:24Because they have a lot of sun. It's a lot of sun. Yeah. There's an endless supply. So now you have to have the ability for the power company to disable your solar because they're overwhelming the grid. You have too much. Too much. Oh, good grief. If only. I mean, I'm surprised that Arizona hasn't gone big on this because they have the sunshine. Yeah, they do. Arizona and New Mexico, they could be huge solar states, but instead they're building data centers in a water-poor area. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, just imagine if our government was into renewables, right? Just imagine. It's ironic because while the current administration doesn't like any of this because they got a lot of donations.

1:57:07It's all happening in spite of that. It's happening anyway. because the economics of it are so good remember that trump stopped that big wind installation uh off the coast of massachusetts it's it's now done the judge said you can't stop it it's now done and and bill gates just got permission to build his uh terra power nuclear this is these are the new you're an expert on this richard these are these new sodium calls on this sodium is not new Okay. So normally we make nuclear power with using water as both the working fluid and the moderator. Light water reactors are the majority of reactors in this world.

1:57:45And there's reason for that. Moderation means we slow the neutrons down. You use what they call a thermal neutron instead of a fast neutron. Because the neutrons interact with the water and it changes. The nice thing when you're in the thermal neutron spectrum is you don't need as many to interact with the radioactive material. So it's a little easier to manage. although it has certain side effects. And you're heating the water for steam to generate electricity as well. That's how the secondary. Yeah, that's the part of, it's the working fluid. It's what moves the heat to the heat exchangers to make the energy.

1:58:18When you're working with sodium, sodium is transparent to neutrons. So you are working in the fast spectrum. Now, there's an upside and a downside to this. The upside of the fast spectrum is high-velocity, high-energy neutrons are more likely to break uranium up rather than to make it into higher actinites. You know, the primary source of plutonium for nuclear bombs is light water reactors. Light water reactors, because the neutrons move slower, sometimes the neutron sticks to the uranium and then decays in an alpha particle to become a, does beta decay to become neptunium. And then when it does it again, it becomes plutonium.

1:58:57Huh. When you're in the fast spectrum, you're far less likely to do that. that tends to break the atoms into pieces. You're doing transmutation, you're making cesium and iodine and a bunch of other things. So that's cool. And plus, molten sodium can handle a lot more heat. In order to get enough energy out of water, we have to pressurize the reactor, right? You wanted the water to get up to about 300 degrees, which it doesn't want to do, so you have to keep it in the pressure vessel. When you do this with sodium, you don't have to pressurize it. Sodium happily runs along about 600 degrees. So you can handle a lot more energy.

1:59:31what's the downside you ask well sodium reacts with absolutely everything mostly water which turns to be everywhere so you have to purge the vessel in all pipes of any moisture of any kind pretty much all hydrogen has to be purged out of it so i seem to remember in high school chemistry that we had a little piece of sodium we took out and exposed to the air and it burst into flame burst into flame you throw it in the water it'll explode yeah okay you're gonna fill up your and We're using this to cool the plant? Well, you're using that as the working fluid. It's not a water heater. We're using this to heat it up.

2:00:05It gets hot. You pump that away. How do they scram this, though, if it doesn't slow the... You scram it pretty much the same way with absorbing rods, with boron rods. So that part's similar. It does run at a higher temperature. The downside is your neutron concentrations are really, really high, So it is tricky to manage. Slowing them down, shutting them out and speeding them up, all of that is fairly tough. But that's part of the taro-powered design. So they're actually using lithium beryllium salts as the heat transfer fluid. So this is a way, instead of... It's not sodium. Well, it's still got its problems.

2:00:48Beryllium is wildly poisonous. Oh. But... Well, I'm not going to eat it. That's okay. No, but the upside to using the salt approach for doing the heat transfer is they can store it. And so rather than having to constantly vary the performance of the reactor, how much you're charging based on power needs, you run it at full bore all the time. And when you don't need as much power, you just store that as excess heat in the beryllium salts. And that's very clever. Like they're talking about it's a 300 megawatt reactor, but they can do like four hours at 500 megawatts because they have all this excess heat stored.

2:01:21the real challenge with molds with with working with sodium reactors is when you do need to shut them down which you do occasionally you have to get all the sodium out of the reactor vessel or reacts maybe it explodes like it's dangerous and fires so there's only really one sodium reactor working in the world right now and it's in russia because they're not that worried about the fires they're okay with that it's chernobyl it was okay we could do it it's not a big deal russian engineering. And to be clear, if you read the article, I mean, they've gotten permission. So they built the energy generation island first.

2:01:57So this was the beryllium salts and the generators and all that stuff. They didn't have permission to build the reactor at all. They just got permission to build the reactor now, but they do not have permission to get any fuel. They can't turn it on yet. No. Well, they're not even allowed to buy the fuel and they need halo fuel, which is like the source of the fuel is going to be a problem. They're going to need literally to specially make that fuel. And anything involving radioactives is hugely difficult. So they, I mean, it's backed by Gates so they can afford to wait. Like they're not exactly on a budget per se.

2:02:31The upside, if they can make this thing work, is it is a fuel burner. They'll want to buy used light water reactor fuel. Oh, yeah. Consume it in this reactor. Neat. So that is a feature if they can make this thing work. And obviously we build more of them because it does tend to consume actinides more so than light water reactors do. And are these the modular, smaller nuclear power plants I keep hearing? So far they've talked about in the 300 megawatt class, which is a sort of large modular reactor.

2:03:07SMRs were kind of a way to be allowed to talk about nuclear reactors when you're not allowed to talk about nuclear reactors. And so, you know, even in the case in Canada, where we were headed down the path of using the GE attache SMR at the Darlington B site, they've now backed away from that. Because once you get all the permitting done and you're ready to build a reactor, it's like, you might as well build a big one. A, you know how to run them already. B, they make a lot more power and they're kind of simpler. You know, the current legal rules for nuclear reactors require a separate control room for each reactor.

2:03:34Well, that's fine if you only have two reactors. But what if you have 16? That's a lot of control rooms. I mean, I interviewed, there's a startup called Deep Fission. I interviewed them about, because their idea is to drill a mile down into the planet, below the aquifer, put a small nuclear reactor down there, use gravity to pressurize it. And yeah, the control room problem is a massive one. It's a big one. because yeah yeah and new scale who's another smr company out of idaho yeah they actually got the permits to be able to do a combined uh uh they they convinced the the the uh energy agency to actually allow them to combine uh control rooms but then they lost their they they lost their buyer so now they're struggling they've now got to deal with romania like they're trying to make this go forward.

2:04:26But the regulatory body was built around large reactors, and it's extremely hard for small reactors to make sense in this current regulatory environment. Let's take a little break. When we come back, Travis Kalanick is back. Oh, boy. Turns up like herpes, yes. And he's been very busy. So, you know, stay tuned. We are talking about all kinds of stuff this week on TWIT. Thanks to Richard Campbell. Great to have you from Runners Radio and Windows Weekly. uh jennifer pattison tui of the verge senior if you were there and mr ian thompson his letter from america appears in techfinitive at techfinitive.com our show today brought to you by spaceship i'm not i'm not talking about ufos i'm talking about spaceship which is my favorite domain registrar but more than that if you've heard us talk about spaceship before there's a reason it keeps coming back.

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2:10:38It's going to be a golden age where you won't have to work. Yeah, but then you also don't get paid. The next golden age will be upon us when the means of growing, mining, manufacturing, and moving physical things becomes fully divorced from human labor. Which does raise the question, well, who's going to buy these things you're growing, mining, manufacturing, and moving if nobody has a job? oh please those are piffling details leo honestly it's just he says the cost of unit cost per unit of intelligence is going down in price by 90 per year that's probably true with ai i don't know total capabilities and general intelligence have increased nearly a thousand fold over the last three years possibly true hardware software and manufacturing productivity will continue to compound each other to ever-increasing speeds of progress we're only a millionth of the way there and don't worry but the inevitable destination is the singularity uh-oh superhuman intelligence and efficiency until then i don't know what's going to happen after that but until then abundance will be creating more jobs not less so there yeah right i i get the feeling with so many of these tech bros that they've read Ian M.

2:11:57Banks and not really understood the message behind it. But it is exactly what Ian Banks' universe was, right? Where there was kind of everything was handled, everything was manufactured. Well, yes, but he kind of skips over the 7 ,000 years before that where there were sort of mass problems. And if you read his notes on the development of the culture, you know, it's just this was a necessity thing. But it got there eventually, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, it's Many generations have to die, but you know, that'll be fine. Well, just as the Palantir CEO said, you know, it's just like, yeah, you're all going to lose your jobs, but trust me, it'll be better.

2:12:34Really. It'll be great. That is test cray, although that is what they're, that's what they think though. Probably. They're saving the trillions of the future. It's the future we care about, not the present. Kalanick says, his last three words are, I never left. um it sure looks like uh it's a pitch to investors remember uber never made money i don't know if he he raised more money than anybody till ai came along right right yeah my favorite quote on all that is when you raise 60 billion dollars there's no way to make good choices you have too much money to make you have too much money yeah you can't possibly make good choices uh somebody pointed out i think it was robert scoble that the what happened at uber was the whole plot was really to have self-driving vehicles and it never made economic sense if humans were involved so but when when he was forced out the company got rid of the autonomous vehicle portion of the business and so it never was going to make money the interesting thing is the guy...

2:13:43I'm sorry. Uber remains the only self-driving vehicle company that's actually killed somebody. They actually went in there. Somebody got run over. They died. And, you know, yeah, you're right. The Uber economic business model doesn't make sense without self-driving cars. And it's interesting to see who they've teamed up with. But I personally wouldn't trust Kalanick further than I could throw him. And I have poor upper body strength. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think Waymo has a fatality as well. Oh, really? So let's make it that's fair. Let's spread it out. I do think the theory here behind robotics in being specialized robots rather than single, rather than an all-purpose robot like a humanoid makes an awful lot of sense.

2:14:29Not sure whether specifically his, you know, this business is going to make sense, But I've spent a lot of time with robots and individual like single purpose robots and even humanoid robots. And there is there's a place for robotics that in our lives and in our workforces and in our homes and single purpose, individual specialized robots that can do one or two things really well, I think is really the future of robotics in our society, rather than the sort of flashy Jetson Iron Man dream of a robot that can do everything. Yes, I just don't see that actually. And I've said this before on the show, I know, and I know there's people in the Discord that vehemently disagree with me and think we're like a day away from humanoid robots.

2:15:24But I think it's a lot further away than we think. And you have more experience with robotic household things than anyone. Yeah, I remember I had the one that fell on me. A robot fell on you for crying. Yes. Almost killed you. Almost got me. And then that's the biggest thing. I think that's the biggest fear and concern and reason why we won't have humanoid robots is they are dangerous. And whereas single purpose or dual purpose specialized robots make a lot more sense. Well, interestingly, Kalanick says he's an investor in Pronto, which is a self-driving truck startup, but it focuses on mining sites where there are no people, right?

2:16:03And in fact, Prado is run by the guy Kalanick recruited from Google, Anthony Lewandowski. He got in trouble with Google for taking information, was claimed taking information from Google and bringing it over to Uber. And apparently he's working with Lewandowski again. Yeah, that was a really interesting case. It was just like, oh, I'm leaving Google. I'm starting, I think it was Otto, self-driving truck software. And, oh, we've just got bought out by Uber for a massive amount of money for a product which doesn't have anything in it. I mean, honestly, Google sued Uber for stealing that information.

2:16:46Lewandowski was actually convicted of stealing trade secrets. I forgot this part. He didn't go to jail because he got pardoned by the president. so yeah also read the court document some of the testimony there the discovery on that this is a really interesting person possibly not in a good way it is it is tempting to think that this is basically another i don't want to say con job but similar to you know did you say startup yes start up with very big ambitions right very global kind of futuristic ambitions but like mining is one of those jobs where like maybe humans shouldn't be doing that anyway like shouldn't be mining right and i kind of i thought that was kind of an interesting insight that you know everything's either grown or mined and then manufactured and that the you know there are really four things that you need to solve.

2:17:46John Cusack said all that. That's the John Cusack monologue. And then transporting them. Cusack said that where? The mining thing is very interesting because in Australia they've already automated a lot of the lorries that are working in mining compounds because it's a really simple use case. There are very limited roads that these trucks can go through because the mine is built down and they build the road in there so you can map it out really easily. So yeah, mining will probably pay, but he's late to the party. But I don't know. When I read that piece and it was just like, give me more money now.

2:18:29It does feel like a kind of a magical pitch deck, you know, but it's okay. I don't have enough money to invest, so I'm safe. um a tennessee grandmother this is a horrific uh case of misidentification a tennessee grandmother was jailed a facial recognition error linked her to fraud she's from tennessee but fargo north dakota police it's not that close to tennessee if my um if my geography is correct identified her uh using face recognition they said oh yeah she walked into a bank in fargo north dakota and uh committed fraud they came to tennessee they arrested her put her in jail for six months in fargo she's a mother of three grandmother of five she said i've never been to north dakota uh she'd never been on an airplane until she was flown to north dakota for charges u.s marshals erased her the only evidence apparently was this face recognition she remained uh started in a tennessee jail four months without bail while awaiting extradition then charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personally identified information and four counts of theft.

2:19:57According to Fargo police records obtained by WDAY News, detectives investigating this case in May and April of last year reviewed surveillance video, used face recognition. The face recognition said, oh yeah, it's this woman in Tennessee. The detective told the court, we got to get her. by the time she got an attorney and went to trial, they proved that she was still in Tennessee at the time, 1 ,200 miles away at the time of this bank fraud. Which a simple check of her bank records and location records easily could have revealed. Yeah, why would it take so long to figure out that she, I mean, they should have made these steps before arresting her.

2:20:44Oh, really? Yeah, it's called an investigation. Yeah, and don't just rely on this technology. Well, to hold her on, I mean, she was held on extradition, right? Like, she hadn't been charged, she hadn't gone to court, she hadn't done anything. Four months. And she lost her home, her dog, her car. Go ahead, tell us the rest of the story, Ian. No, no, this is it, she lost it all, but it gets worse because when they found out their error, they released her from jail on Christmas Eve with no money, no way of getting in contact with people, and it was only down to the kindness of a local person that she actually got somewhere to spend Christmas that was warmer.

2:21:21I mean, Fargo, I've never been, but I know it's damn cold on Christmas Eve. They stick her out of the jail in Fargo in the winter. Bye-bye, I guess we got the wrong person. See you later. They don't take her back to Tennessee. I assume she is going to get a lot of money in the future. One would hope, yes. While she was jailed and unable to pay bills, she lost her home, her cat, her dog. No amount of money replaces that. She says no one from Fargo has police department has apologized. So this is where AI really can go wrong. But this is computers full stop. Remember when it's like, oh, the computer said it, so it must be true.

2:21:59Right. Right. Yeah. Somehow the science fiction layer we've added to computing is brought back of this level of stupidity. Yeah. And really, as always, it's not the AI, it's the people using it that are the problem. well yeah but i mean what kind of policeman actually goes out and says well the ai said it's fine you know we're not going to bother doing any kind of investigation in jail for four months while we figure out how to extradite her yeah and there's no comeback to them because you know fargo taxpayers will pay the eventual lawsuit which i hope she wins and gets an enormous amount of money out of here's the good news alex carp the ceo of palantir oh geez says that you and me both richard yeah i haven't heard from that guy ever he was this is an interview on cnbc said ai technology disrupts humanities trained largely democratic voters and makes their economic power less and increases the economic power of vocationally trained working class often male working class voters so ai is going to be bad if you're educated female and a democrat but it's going to be good i don't even understand the logic that's just extraordinarily convol can you know i don't even yeah i don't even understand the logic uh i guess get the logic the fact that he said it out loud was really real i mean i know it's a Peter Thiel company, so it's obviously going to be a bit weird.

2:23:36But the fact that he actually said, this is what we're working towards is just like, are you aware of public relations? I mean, this is a sort of constructive way of saying it democratizes knowledge. Like, you could have gone down that path. We argued that was what the internet was going to do in the first place. And of course, Palantir's all over the government. The Register had this very important story about how the Department of agriculture used palantir's lethal ai weaponry to find seat assignments for employees at the department nice yeah no they're into the uk as well they've just signed major contracts with britain's national healthcare uh health service and um in part organized by the disgraced peter mandelson but i mean they are getting their claws into government the usda's uh chief data and artificial intelligence officer christopher alvarez says other software companies could probably sort out seating plans but only palantir could do the job right probably assigns democratic women offices way far away i would guess but i would also argue like let's be clear we're not fans of this guy but he's not a stupid man no he's very smart who was he actually talking to when he said those absurd things.

2:24:57Yeah. Right? I think he's looking for a contract. Somebody who doesn't want democratic women in power. I'm looking forward to the phone calls I get for, you know, what I can do from that. He knows who signs those checks. Yeah. MIT Technology Review. How Pokemon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world. We kind of knew this, right? When Niantic, which was a Google company at the time, created pokemon go the wonderful game my wife still plays avidly since july of 2016. so there was a game before pokemon go that built this data set ingress yes yeah and i was the ingress player back in the day yeah because it was you had to be a lot smarter you couldn't be a democratic woman and play ingress so uh no ingress was ingress was hard but it had the same idea which is that you walk around in the real world and use actual geographic waypoints the genius of Niantic is they got us to build the data set because I wanted more nodes to play Ingress I would find everything that could possibly be tagged as a landmark exactly to get more nodes in my neighborhood thanks to Ingress and Pokemon Go they have 30 billion 30 billion waypoints all over the world unbelievable images of urban landmarks outsourced to Pokemon Go players and they are selling that information to delivery robots genius because there was no money in ingress there's no money in pokemon go i mean english they started to try and charge for things and people just stopped playing including me so the company's latest product is a model they're out of the pokemon business remember they sold that to the uh uh saudi arabian uh sovereign wealth fund their new company's niantic spatial they say their latest product is a model that can pinpoint your location on a map within a few centimeters based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in the area it knows immediately oh i know where you are i can be used by more than just delivery robots yeah there's i mean there's been a lot of news recently around how, you know, the surveillance state is developing in this country and yeah, things like this.

2:27:16It's like, it's great when we have technology companies creating something that's useful. But now when we have a government that is becoming increasingly authoritarian there and, you know, based on the previous article as well, like all the pieces and parts are so easily brought together to like just know where everyone is at any point and who they are based on facial recognition that may confuse their mother from tennessee with someone in north dakota it's like stories go together they mesh don't they they all go together somehow i don't know i didn't plan it that way let me take one last break and then because oscars are going to start any minute now and then uh and we will have some funny final stories to cheer you up okay to cheer you up Jennifer Patterson-Tui, who's just can't wait to see who won the Best Picture Award.

2:28:08How many of the 10 pictures did you see? I managed four, I think. It's hard. Maybe five. Lisa and I used to have this thing of we're going to see every one, but they keep adding pictures. But now there's 10, it gets a little harder. I think enough people were doing that that they just added more because it's good for business. It's good for business. Yeah. I have not seen Sinners, though, which I know I should have. And that's probably the one that's going to win. Oh, it's a brilliant one. whole family's seen except for me such a wonderful film it combines vampires and great music and it's just a really interesting it's such a different genre busting film it's great it's shot so well too it's a beautiful film it's beautiful uh and uh i think the star is going to win a best actor because he plays two roles plays his brothers that's the way to get it yeah like oscars are nothing if not predictable yeah yeah that's right um anyway we'll be back in just a moment with ian jennifer and richard on a very fun uh this week in tech thank you all for being here we appreciate our show today uh brought to you by threat locker we had a great time didn't we richard back in Orlando last week for the ThreatLocker.

2:29:24Zero Trust World. So much fun. They are a very impressive company. I learned a lot. They had a bunch of great seminars, hands-on workshops and stuff. They do Zero Trust. Their Zero Trust platform now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of Zero Trust solutions. They've actually made some big announcements at Zero Trust World, protecting endpoints, networks, and the cloud. This is new. By extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, ThreatLocker makes sure the devices are validated through a secure broker before connecting to platforms like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Asana, Google Workspace, and GitHub.

2:30:08Your nightmare is somebody takes a thumb drive and plugs it into your M365 database, right? and not just exfiltrates information but infiltrates malware ransomware or they send you a phishing email or you see an ad on a website that actually is malware even if that happens even if a user is sticking a usb thumb drive into your database or successfully phished attackers cannot this is so so cool about zero trust they cannot access resources unless they have possession of the user's trusted device and the trust is built in with threat locker threat locker works in every industry pcs and macs and the cloud now it provides 24 7 us-based support the best support ever we met a lot of the support people they're great windows mac linux of course i always leave linux out no linux 2 it enables comprehensive visibility and control ask rob thackeray he's an end user technical architect at Heathrow Airport.

2:31:13Now this, if you think about it, Heathrow Airport is the last place you want ransomware, right? He said ThreatLocker was the most intuitive solution we tested and the responsiveness of the organization, the willingness to engage with us, set up a demo and work with us on weekly audit reviews was very good. It's great to have an ongoing relationship with a company that's so responsive to our requests. I am not surprised now, having met the ThreatLocker team, So impressed by them. They're trusted by so many companies, global enterprises like JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver.

2:31:49ThreatLocker consistently receives high honors in industry recognition. It's a G2 high performer and best support for enterprise summer 2025. PeerSpot ranked them number one in application control. They got GetApp's best functionality and features award in 2025. With ThreatLocker and their ring fencing, you can confidently ensure that users have access to a consistent, safe network connection. I think sometimes you think zero trust means zero access. No, it means that users can do what they need to do without risk. You can have the offices, remote users, internal servers, critical services, all maintain smooth operations without the need, and this is key to open inbound ports or deploy traditional VPN solutions, which give you a point out there in the real world that the bad guys can hammer on, your end users will get the secure, reliable internal system access they need without, and this is important, complex infrastructure changes.

2:32:53Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily, and cost-effectively with ThreatLocker. I was so impressed. Visit threatlocker.com slash twit. Get a free 30-day trial. Learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. It's threatlocker.com slash twit. We thank them so much for their support. It was really great to be out there. And I hope we can do that again. Zero Trust World in Orlando. Are you ready for flying cars, Jennifer? Well, I was just in Orlando and I'm doing lots of flying. What? Were you? I was. I went to Universal. At Disney World. Yeah, epic, epic Universal.

2:33:33Oh, did you do the Harry Potter? you're flying on a broom through Hogwarts ride? That's fun. I haven't done that. That's the Hagrid's one, right? Yeah. No, I did the, it was Ministry of Magic. So it's the new one. It was very fun. Oh my goodness, though, that park is a disaster. Is it? Oh, because it was crowded. Just all the rides were down. Oh, everything was broken. It was the night of the clocks going forward. And you think everything broke? I read this on Reddit because while I was standing in line, I was on Reddit like, what do I do to get around Epic faster? Reddit is like the solution for everything.

2:34:13And apparently they were saying that this is a big issue in parks because everything's run on computers. And when the clocks go forward, it somehow managed every year, twice a year, manages to mess them up. That's a good programming. But there are lots of flying in Epic and no flying cars, though. So, but I would love a flying car. That's like my dream. So I'm excited about this. The federal government has announced a new pilot program designed to get new kinds of ultralight vehicles and EVTOLs, which is electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles running. I mean, they're basically drones though, right?

2:34:53They're big drones, yeah. Yeah. Well, but there's a pilot right now still. Yeah. But soon, maybe not. When you're in the ultralight class, you need very little training oh disturbingly little good yeah there's an untrained person sitting in there pretending to be a pilot my son is training to be a pilot right now and yeah it's this is the future yeah real pilot training is no fooling but the ultralight class because largely ultralights are a single person you're only likely to kill yourself in them so the faa is like yeah go ahead but there are companies like archer but yeah you know archer has an Electric taxi, four passengers, 60 to 90-minute trips.

2:35:33It'll be in Texas, Florida, and New York. So that'll be a service, right? Yeah. Well, like right now, if you're rich, you could take a helicopter to the airport from Manhattan, right? I think that's what it is. Come on. We've all driven on American roads, and we've seen how American drivers operate. And I'm sorry. The idea of letting your standard non-pilot trained person do this, the software better be damn good because otherwise you're going to have these things falling out of the sky yeah it doesn't just affect the person in the plane it's whoever's below the thing the question is can electric based giant drones these four seater drones so they're not burning fuel even though they're piloted like just as an uber service but going rooftop to rooftop like that what was always proposed in new york except that helicopters are extremely loud and they're expensive and fragile right and so these are more robust more redundant machines like you could have a certain you know availability going rooftop to rooftop uh here is from the faa here's the video it's going to look just like this the jetsons i'm sorry when you lead up with the jetsons you instantly lost the argument i think the same guy does the white house uh socials is doing this one so they're all this new technology these evitals that are going to take people from evitals all right that's how you say it huh that's no nobody says it that way okay yeah is that scott percent i think it is we're going to innovate with evitals okay i did see a flying robot vacuum at ces that can like has little drones that live.

2:37:16Well, what good is a flying vacuum? To get it up to the stairs. Oh, the stairs. The Dalek problem, yes. I am going to fall over. I'm sorry, that was Sean Duffy. I would have dominated the world, but I had a curb in my way. They all look the same to me. Hey, here's a big story. Now, you mentioned the Academy Awards are still on network television, but will not be by 2030. They'll be on YouTube. this year youtube surpassed disney not this year last year 2025 disney paramount and warner in ad revenue it is now the number one media platform 40 billion dollars in ad revenue remember when it was ad free yeah those days have long gone it's more than disney nbc paramount and warner brothers discovery together together because all of those people are also on youtube yeah well that's true but i think it's pretty clear i mean you pointed out youtube tv is 85 bucks a month now it's it's it's cable yeah exactly so all those people are also on youtube yeah i knew youtube had it though when so my husband is the absolute least tech forward person ever hates actually hates technology and only got an iphone like eight years ago um and he now watches more youtube than regular tv and it's like that's because it has all the niche the regular tv is yeah if you want alaska fishing guide videos exactly go to youtube you go watch them on youtube and he he follows like these motorbike, camping motorbike influencers, like who go all over the world and do amazing trips and he's living vicariously watching them.

2:39:05He wants to poop in a bucket just like them, right? He wants to be, he wants to live in the middle of nowhere with no technology, except for YouTube. As long as I get YouTube, I'll go on. As long as you got YouTube. That's the secret, that's the secret reason we've got satellite. But you know the key thing about YouTube is every long tail culture you could imagine. Exactly. it's in there somewhere everybody's YouTube experience including us that's remarkable I mean during lockdown I started watching a channel called the Outdoor Boys and it's a bloke in Alaska who basically goes out as Jennifer said goes out into the wilderness and builds his own campfires and the rest of it and yeah it is cable now because you've got a list of channels you're subscribed to and you just check on those and see what comes up uh the ignoble prizes which i've always loved every year is moving out of the u.s they're moving to switzerland because they don't think it's safe in the u.s this is from the reg they used to do it at harvard mit and boston the next one's going to be in zurich mark abrahams the founder and ceremonies mc said during the past year it's become unsafe for our guests to visit the country.

2:40:24We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners or the international journalists who covered the event to travel to the USA this year. It's going to be an issue with the World Cup. It's going to be an issue with the Olympics, which are a few years off. The MVP Summit is next week, and the number of non-US people going to the Summit now has dropped off hugely. I mean, it's a huge issue for Hacker Summer Camp as well. I mean, a lot of hackers aren't coming to... Even GDC, which was last week, the Game Developers Conference, A lot of companies didn't go because it was in the U.S. You put a grandmother in jail for months for no particular reason.

2:41:02And same thing, just let her go one day. You scare a lot of people. No, I mean, it was interesting. I was at RSA last year and I was speaking to Sophos, which is essentially now a Canadian company. And they told their staff, you don't have to go, but we would like you to. you know, we're giving you that get out because crossing the borders these days is tricky and as I say DEFCON, Black Hat, B-Sides is coming up next weekend a lot of European hackers are staying away because just in case you know, it's like yeah, I mean, it's like Hutchins who saved, you know, who killed off an entire virus system was picked up in DEFCON because of something he'd done as a teenager on the way out.

2:41:51By the way, Marcus Hutchins was one of the keynoters at the Zero Trust World. But we had to leave before he spoke. We didn't get to see his talk. But it's... He's a great chap. Yeah. I mean, I have a photo of him. We were doing a data sharing thing. With the DEF CON badges that year, you had to share with a certain number of people. And I got a picture of us sharing data. And he's a lovely chap. He's gone a bit influencer of late, but it's a real problem because a lot of the top talent isn't coming to the U.S. anymore because they're worried about border controls. And all it takes is one RC border patrol officer to get you in a whole world of trouble.

2:42:31Yeah, with no recourse. Yeah, exactly. Not all as well in Switzerland, though. This is also from the register. They did an e-voting pilot. unfortunately uh 2048 ballots an interesting number cannot be counted because they couldn't be decrypted oops oops uh you know they were very secure so secure this place is key we mean it uh three usb sticks were used all with the correct code but none of them worked so i you know yeah what with the proton mail scandal in switzerland at the moment oh yeah and it's not not exactly the best yeah i mean it's it's kind of iffy and also the swiss are really uptight they make the germans look relaxed um i went to a press conference in switzerland and the bloke announced he came in 10 minutes late um was just like i'm very sorry i was busy doing something and one of the journalists said oh polishing your nazi gold were you this guy was instabanned you know oh yeah you don't say that yeah even if it's true uh well and as i often do with an in memoriam you know it's one of the things we've been doing this for so long uh that many of the people who were young when we started are now passing away and at the age of 92 the turing award-winning computer scientist who invented quicksort tony whore c-i-r whore has passed but he was 92 um but we should probably mention that because it was a good life and well lived yes you know i mean he did some really fundamental work yeah he said uh there are two ways of constructing a software design one is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies the first method is far more difficult very inspired uh he will be missed but we are grateful to him for quicksort which is and he got the the cheering award which was is the tech equivalent of the oscars that's right speaking of the guy who takes the blame for the null he says that was the worst mistake the the null yeah the null was the most expensive mistake he made the idea that a that a that a boolean is not that's true or false but could also be a denial uh no and coding around nulls man is hard like it's just like the sheer amount of code to cope with a null and uh and tony whore years ago just said worst mistake i ever made was introducing the null isn't that it's kind of like um tim berners lee was interviewed and he said what's the biggest thing about the world wide web that you didn't get he goes i have no idea why cats are so popular you've obviously never had one he introduced null references in algol and uh it's referred to as the billion dollar mistake at least that's what he called the one yep um hey you know what of course that's a big man to own up to yeah sorry about the billion he said it's because it was so easy to implement a lot of people got jobs though probably a lot of people employed because of that probably kept a lot of people busy that's true that's true all right hey thank you richard campbell we'll see you on wednesday really appreciate your spending time with us on this sunday it's real close to uh uhst patty's day so got a little irish oh what a little irish something for windows weekly well i'm gonna make myself a corn beef so we can have corn beef and cabbage excellent lovely food yes i mean in san francisco they had the parade yesterday and it was amateur hour in the pubs and i just i put out on blue sky just like please tip your bartender because they're having a hell of a time of it it was just crazy crazy uh richard we'll see you wednesday with uh something a little something irish of course you catch risher on run his radio.com where you also find dot net rocks and if you like richard's uh uh talks about all things scientific like his nuclear talk he does these deep dive geek talks on dot net rocks is there a way to search for him just look for geek search for geek and you'll find him thank you richard wonderful to see you take care jennifer pattison tui senior tech reviewer at the verge always a pleasure to have you on we'll catch you on tech news weekly every month with micah sargent yeah always fun to be here even with the oscars yeah no you go now you can skip the ads so that's a good thing i know you see all the all the dresses has it has started right i believe it started 15 minutes ago so but don't watch don't start at the middle you want to see the opening number and all of that so yeah thank you jennifer run out of here go go go are your kids watching do you does your family watch it or is it just you no no my family is thrilled that i haven't forced them to watch it yet it's really interesting it used to be like a national holiday it was appointment viewing.

2:47:57Everyone had to go. Yeah. Everyone had to watch it. And now, yeah. We're the few, the proud. In our generation. I know. It's sad. Very sad. But I still love it. Me too. Cling. Cling to it. Can't wait to watch it. And of course, wonderful see you, Ian Thompson. I'm glad you'd write in that column at Techfinitiv, Letter from America. And you'll catch his freelance writing all over the internet and he's on blue sky if you could figure out how to spell his name i a that's the problem nope yeah i know uh my parents and i have had words put it that way always great to see you i'm sorry you know we used to have a studio and ian and his wife would come up and they'd even go to his little english shop we had in town and buy more marmite and you know but not anymore oh they have such great scotch eggs the best place to get scotch eggs i've ever found in california Really?

2:48:52I like Scotch eggs. Is that a high bar? I mean... Well, there is that. It's a bar. There is a place in San Francisco. They've just opened a British pub. They're charging 15 bucks for a Scotch egg. What? One egg? Does it dance? What? Yeah. It's like egg, sausage, and breadcrumbs. Well, exactly. You know, if I want to get screwed, I want a kiss, not a credit card receipt. But, you know, it's just like... What do they call them? Bacon buddies? Bacon buns? Oh, no. Bacon butties. Bacon butties. The standard. Yeah. If it wasn't for the fact that American bacon is so bad, then, you know. Bad, bad, bad.

2:49:31Have you found a back bacon sauce yet, Jennifer? Oh, what? Sorry? A back bacon sauce. No. I have not found a bacon in this country. It's impossible. Sausages either. Really hard. Good sausages. Very hard. We just go to the British butcher and literally buy all the things you need. Oh, nice. we have dedicated bitches for such a task i i do think i'm just going to mention this i don't know if it'll satisfy but we get our bacon from a little polish company called nuskies n-e-u-s-k-e-s and they have triple cut triple thick butcher cut bacon at a ridiculous expensive price yeah this doesn't look good i i let me let me show you new skis i just found a recipe for bacon buddies new skis is the place to get your bacon i bet you i don't know i don't know i i'm just thinking it I found a place in Berkeley that does proper back bacon, but they charge a dollar a slice.

2:50:24And it's just like, oh, for goodness sake, I love bacon, but not that much. I think Newskies is more than that. I just bought 84 ounces for$130. How much is that? That's a lot. Yeah, I mean, I've cheated. I've got a mate who works for the butcher. they will actually cut you the proper piece of pork so you can let it cure. It's not really bacon is it? It's something else. It's basically pork with a mild fat round. Whereas American streaky bacon is just a minuscule amount of meat and an awful lot of fat. Americans call it ham. Americans call it ham. It's more like a ham. or Canadian bacon. Canadian bacon's a little closer.

2:51:18Yeah. They're both loin cows. That said, no one does hash browns like America. That was a real eye-opener. Or pancakes. Or waffles. Well, the Belgians do waffles pretty well. All right, now you're making me hungry. No, I have ribs on the grill, on the smoker. I think I did this last time. Because it's like six hours. It's perfect. The show's just long enough to smoke up. Have you got a big egg or? I have a smart smoker right now. I'm testing the brisket smart smoker. It's brisk it. Oh, I have a trader. I haven't been able to since we've been under construction, but I want to get back to my briskets.

2:52:02I love making a good brisket. But yeah, you get up at three in the morning, this started. But the great thing about the smart one is you don't have, you just, it does, it has, uses algorithms to adjust the cook as you go. So I just put the ribs on, press go and come back six hours later and it's perfect. And it's brisket.ai. So you know it's brisket.ai. Oh, now I'm wondering maybe an AI barbecue. And it's really not that expensive. I wanted the$400, which compared to a Traeger. Traeger is really expensive. Yeah. AI powered Wi-Fi grill. Oh, maybe a brisket is in my future. Yeah, it's pretty good.

2:52:44I've been testing it for a while. I did a video on it a little while ago, too. Oh, good. I'll go look at the review. Yeah. But I'm hoping you mix your own sauce, right? Did what, sorry? I hope you mix your own sauce. I know you live in the South where it's a religion, but... Yes. And you have a paintbrush that you slop it on with? Slop it on. Yeah. I'm not a purist barbecue person because to me, barbecue means cooking burgers in the backyard, which is what English people do. And getting rained on while you do it, yes. but I'm learning. I've never made a good brisket, though. That's very hard to do.

2:53:19So I like to go to the local barbecue shops here, which are pretty awesome. Yeah, you're in a part of the right world. You can get good barbecue. Yeah, yeah. It is remarkable that in the Bay Area, you cannot get good barbecue. Barbecue and pizza are two things that the Bay Area does not do well. I'm so jealous of you. Everett and Jones in Berkeley. Everett and Jones in Berkeley. Yeah. yeah yeah i've been there that's the one where they're behind bars and they slide the food out and they put a piece of white bread on it and they slide it out into the bars yeah i've been there thank you everybody we do go eat go watch the oscars whatever you want to do have a drink uh we do uh this show every sunday from two to five p.m pacific five to eight eastern that's 2100 UTC.

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2:55:19So it helps. We've been smoking this show for a long time. It's a long, slow cook. Thank you, everybody, for being here. We'll see you next week. Thank you, Jennifer, Richard, and Ian. Have a great evening. Another twit is in the can. This is amazing. Doing the twit. Doing the twit. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. Burnout Paradise is hailed as the wildest night out in New York City by Time Out New York. Now off-Broadway at the Astor Place theater. It's a live show you'll never forget as the people on stage make a desperate attempt to complete a series of escalating tasks, all while running on treadmills.

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