TWiT 1079: Fans. Only Fans. - Is Mythos Preview Too Powerful for Public Release?

27:34And they're going to be incredible at that, just like humans experts are. And I think that the AGI thing is going to slowly sort of fade away as the sort of finish line for this. And it's going to get more about who can build the best models for specific things. That's really where I think we see the industry moving away from this idea of like AI, and it's going to have consciousness. It's going to be incredible. And it's going to be one model rule them all. I think that idea is going to slowly die.

28:02Ant Pruitt:I think that's exactly right, Jason. I think it's our own innocence that makes us think, oh, we're about to hit AGI. And then we're going to hit super intelligence. And once we get to the point where it's like the Turing test, right? It was like, oh, some computer is going to pass the Turing test. Now it's a banality that everything can pass the Turing test. And it turns out the Turing test was a nothing burger. It's like not even a good test, right? so there was also a huge craze in the 1920s right of the mechanical man where they would go to state fairs with this thing that would have a voice courtesy of a record player that was inside it was smoked cigarettes and all this stuff and it's like every like all the all the all the farmers and stuff who saw that said oh we're two or three years away from people being replaced by these mechanical men right well no no not you know we just we're just i wouldn't even say that today no i mean it's you watch one of these things load a dishwasher it's like get out of my way you silly even all of what what um boston dynamics does and then when when every time i go to corporate i drive right past there like i see it i'm like this is really cool i as a nerd i enjoy it you know we grew up watching robot shows but there's still a long way off and i think the funny thing is i think the way we feel about it is a little bit different from the people who never grew up watching all the misses see we've had the opportunity mike just nailed it so tightly in my brain i can explain this better why are you not scared i get all my people ask me all that why are you not scared of this whatever and i guys you gotta remember we grew up watching all the things that were supposed to happen in the next couple years and none of them has happened because it's the computers isn't as dope as you think they are or when people complain about the algorithm for youtube and i'm like programmatically that can't work and the reason why you believe this myth is because you don't understand enough computer science to understand they can't code what you think it's doing it doesn't know how to pick you out of billions of people and take your video and push it down so nobody sees it no one's watching the video because the video sucks you just don't want to believe that so it's easier to think that youtube is stopping from somebody from seeing your video so mike you nailed it because of we've saw all the movies we've been through the asimovs we've been through you know star wars and star trek and all these other things and we saw what supposed to look like and i think that's what some of us are thinking about agentic other people are thinking about it because they don't have a a long enough time on the planet to have seen that yeah this is not what you think and we're still a long ways off we're going to take a break and uh i'm this is a good panel to discuss this stuff i will i think we do have to talk about the ai because you're old and we've been here we've seen that we've seen it all and we're human damn it and we're human as far as we know we're human you know it's not going to be long before you it won't be really that easy to tell i mean it almost is there already uh that scares me a little bit too mike elgin is here uh machine society.ai uh is a great newsletter you should read it absolutely and we'll talk about his his amazing tours that he does with uh amira elgin his wife all over the world at gastronomia.net it's great to have you mike from tuscany from louisville kentucky jason heiner uh long time zdnet uh stalwart formerly editor-in-chief he's now editor-in-chief at the deep view he's taken the ai plunge the deep view dot com i think we've all seen the writing on the wall right that this we gotta this is the next big thing i mean i've seen people saying i don't disagree with it it's it's as big as or bigger than the industrial revolution this is a huge leap for mankind for better or worse and there were bad there was bad things about the industrial revolution and nobody can deny that also here doc rock the doctor of rock he is a director of strategic partnerships at ecamm good friend youtuber at doc rock on youtube great to see you as well in the purpleness of the grotto our show there was a san francisco radio guy who uh he did a radio show he was in a normal studio but he always described it as the purpleness of the grotto late at night al jasbo collins and he had an owl he said that he would talk to and he created such a word picture i still see him in the purpleness of the grotto but you actually are in the purple purpleness of the grotto yeah it's a It's an homage to Alzheimer's.org because of my father-in-law, who's no longer with us, and my mother, who is going into the deeper stages now.

32:33So I just want to remind people that all this stuff that we're talking about, I love it, and I'm in it, and I'm a hardcore nerd. But what I wanted to do, AGI, is solve Alzheimer's. yeah and then i'm cool because out of out of us on the panel mathematically three of us will have uh someone in our lives or a partner or whoever who gets dementia slash alzheimer's so it's just

32:58Ant Pruitt:i already do my mom and my dad oh so it's 93 yeah there you go both alzheimer's i had a grandmother too just passed away yeah yeah yeah so that's what my mom and my dad both have it i'm on the road to the purple the purpleness why keep my brain working so hard i'm like please me too exactly it's also why i'm i'm working on my obi-wan because he's going to take over at some point for my for my memory and my mind uh thank you all three of you for being here it's great to have you this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by our great friends at bitwarden the trusted leader in passwords pass keys and secrets management with over 10 million users across 180 countries and more than 50 ,000 businesses.

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36:06Ant Pruitt:It's much more secure than anything else. Bitwarden's working with Microsoft on native passkey support while extending SSO to automatically log users into more apps, making credential management across devices more seamless than ever. And that's what we all need. And here's another thing. It's not just for enterprise. For us nerds, if you want a lightweight option, Bitwarden offers a self-hosted password manager they call it bitwarden lite self-hosted for home labs personal projects quick deployments with minimal overhead these this is this company is open source first and they care about their users their open source code is regularly audited by third-party experts it meets sock 2 type 2 gdpr hipaa ccpa iso 27001 2002 standards it's the best it's what i use what i recommend get started today with a bit warden trial for free of teams or enterprise plans or get started for free forever across all devices unlimited passwords pass keys secrets all devices as an individual user bitwarden.com twit that's bitwarden.com twit we thank them so much for their support this week in tech so there was an article in the new yorker very very long article by ronan faro uh and uh andrew mainz i can't remember his last name um it was essentially a takedown of sam altman uh why it says can we trust this guy who's in charge of open ai one of the most consequential technologies ever um they didn't accuse him of anything illegal as far as i could tell i mean maybe the sec needs to investigate some of this stuff but there's not been an investigation outside of open AI.

37:55Ant Pruitt:Some people took it pretty seriously. Sam Altman got firebombed at 3.45 in the morning a couple of nights ago. He says in his blog post, thankfully, bounced off the house. No one got hurt. But not only was he there, his family was there. He apologizes in the blog post. He says, I haven't always been the best steward of open AI. i haven't always been the best human being but there are some things i'm proud of as well as some mistakes um i don't know where do we stand on sam altman open ai so i read the i subscribed to the new yorker and read the whole article and it's long long article i did too devoted a whole morning to it yeah essentially to me the biggest transgression described in there it was very well resourced article and of course run 18 months 100 interviews yeah yeah is that basically he spent the first few years of open ai spinning a tale to prospective ai engineers about their uh sort of their their you know public benefit corporation type mission where they they were going to uh make AI benefit mankind.

39:13Ant Pruitt:And they even had a thing in their charter where if somebody else reached AGI before they would, they would throw all their resources behind that other company to help them, that sort of thing. And he used that, according to the article, they accused him of using that sort of message to get engineers to work for OpenAI at lower salaries than they could get elsewhere. And then when they went to investors, they had the opposite story. We're all about profit. We're going to take over the world. We're going to do all this stuff. Please invest in us. So he basically had a story telling each person whatever they wanted to hear for maximum benefit of the company.

39:55Ant Pruitt:And so the way that Altman characterizes this in his blog post is he says, I'm not proud of being conflict averse, which has caused great pain for me and OpenAI. So he's accused of lying. And Sam Altman is basically defending himself by saying he's conflict averse. In other words - They accused him of that too. I mean, they said that was the root cause of some of the things was he would lie to people just because he didn't want a conflict. That's not what you were just talking about exactly so it's this when it gets down to the money getting people at lower salaries and then getting more investment telling opposite stories that to me was the biggest transgression again not illegal probably kind of kind of a theranos type of it's slimy approach it's a little slimy well now theranos was illegal and she went to jail for deceiving the investors so yeah i you know i think first first of all with the firebomb we don't know that it's connected to the new york new new yorker store story so we should we should be thoughtful about that you know uh hopefully they find you know whoever did it and whatever anybody thinks about sam altman um there's just no excuse for that you know i i just hated to see them you know firebombing his house or trying to firebomb his house.

41:21Thankfully, nothing bad happened. But I just think that this narrative was a little opportunistic because I think that Sam Altman has long been accused of sort of talking out of both sides of his mouth sometimes.

41:36Ant Pruitt:You don't raise$122 billion, the largest raise in history, which was just last month, without being a salesman. That's right. And salespeople, right? You know how to talk to some people this way and other people that way. But I think one of the things that has happened, I think the reality of what happened with OpenAI was they originally started it because they were afraid of Google controlling the most powerful technology in the world. And they're like, we want to offer a counterpoint to Google because they had concerns about Google's own sort of ethical center, right? And so they were like, let's create something that is a little bit more altruistic.

42:19And that's where it started. And then over time, OpenAI became a much more important company and the opportunity became much bigger than I think they even originally considered it was, at least commercially. And they had a chance to, you know, ChatGPT became so popular in a way that I think that even surprised them. I mean, they've said this clearly, there's plenty of that. And then they were like, okay, we could turn this into something way bigger as a public company. That's why the whole, they had to redo the deal with Microsoft and all of that. So I think, I just think the New Yorker narrative is maybe a little too clean.

42:58I don't know that it would exactly, you know, happen maybe in retrospect, right? Things become a lot clearer. But I think what we know is that Altman is opportunistic. Everybody's always known that. I do think that he's not quite as nefarious as he's pointed in that article. I think being opportunistic and nefarious is a continuum maybe. And so we'll see. But I think that the company now knows that they have this incredible opportunity, and yet they also know that they've been losing the narrative over the last six months, right? That Anthropic has become the good guys of AI and they have been painted as the bad guys.

43:42And they're very much conscious of that. And they're trying to think of, okay, what do we need to do? Because they need the support of the public in order to pursue this mission that they want, because they're ultimately going to need to have a lot of people have confidence in who they are. And they're also going public

44:00Ant Pruitt:in the next, this year, right? That's right. They're going to have an IPO. So they need to win over. Yeah, they need to win over investors and they need to win over the public in a way that they aren't right now. And I think they're really grappling with who we are and what is - Do you think we can trust Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic? I feel like, I mean, look at Steve Jobs, look at Bill Gates, look at, I mean, Jack Welch, look at, I can go on and on and on. the difference is shouldn't we have uh a higher level of uh of ethics for people controlling companies that could terminate mankind well we should have a higher level of ethics for people controlling companies period yes we should isn't there shouldn't there even be a higher bar well and that's what the so this is the article by ronan farrow and let me get his name right andrew Morantz.

44:50Ant Pruitt:That's the headline. Sam Altman may control our future. Can he be trusted? And if you read the article, the answer to that is obviously no. No one should trust Sam Altman. Can you trust OpenAI, I guess, is the next question. Does Sam Altman reflect OpenAI? Because as you pointed out earlier with the anthropic discussion, Mike, the engineers have a lot of weight here. It's not Sam Altman's company exactly. But the lead engineers who were initially brought in, two guys, I've spaced in on their name, but they had very high bars for ethics for the company, and they were very, very concerned. He was sort of strunging them along, saying, yeah, yeah, that's what we're going to do.

45:32Ant Pruitt:And then he would go and do other things when they're not in the room. And so I think to a certain extent, many of these AI researchers and engineers, we can and should trust. And they should be, those are the kinds of people who should be in charge of the decisions around AI safety, I think, other than this kind of weaselly salesman. Right. Did you all see the document that OpenAI published this week? It's called, it's sort of went under the radar, but it's called Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age Ideas to Keep People First. Is this policy document, policy blueprint. Yeah. So I got to talk to, this was on the Deep View, but I got to talk to the lead researcher, you know, on this and Adrian Ecofe.

46:24And so the interesting thing, this is, again, I think them trying to say, look, there are a lot of opinions inside OpenAI about how this could go, right? This being sort of the AI revolution unfolding and bringing a lot of things. And this document, so this is about 30 researchers, 30, 35 researchers, and then their policy team worked on this document. And there's some, interestingly in there, there's some really, it's divided into two parts. essentially, which is about the economics and then about building a resilient society. So, really about keeping AI safe and under human control. And so, in this document, the researchers sort of unfold a bunch of ideas.

47:10And these are like some pretty, I thought of them as like, not radical, but, you know, revolutionary in their scope. So, they talked about creating a public wealth fund so that, you know, the government, like the U.S. government in this case, investing in these AI companies as they go public and then sort of distributing the benefits to the populace. Now, this is a very controversial idea. It's sort of like, you know, how in Alaska, if you're an Alaska citizen, like everybody benefits from the oil there. It's sort of like that model.

47:41Ant Pruitt:I like that. I like that model. I think that's good. Yeah. So and then they talked about - Of course, we have a thing. We have a system to do that. It's called the tax system. So they get to the tax system, too. So it's interesting here. They had AI driven corporate gains and automated labor. So basically taxing companies that are replacing human workers and earning higher profits that they should pay higher taxes. Right. If they're if they're displacing workers. Another one was 32 hours. Those taxes maybe should be dedicated to supporting the people they've replaced. That's exactly the thing in there.

48:16Ant Pruitt:Right. No, these are these are just ideas. Right. They said, this is not a final thing. This is like a thought starter. This is the problem with that article, though. Now, everything that comes out of open AI, I'm going to see through that lens of, oh, is this just more slimy propaganda? Or is it virtue signaling, right? This is what when we were talking about it at the Deep View and Nat Rubio licked our senior reporter and I were sort of debating the story. This is one of the things that we were thinking about. But there are a couple other things that are interesting. sort of last two are just the 32 hour, four day work week, which is, which is if, if AI is making workers more productive, let workers get some of the benefits of it and not just go to the company's bottom line, right?

48:55Reasonable idea. And then the last one was, you know, a right to AI, similar to like broadband and electricity, where we sort of have subsidized universal access so that not just the people with resources are the ones that end up benefiting for the technologies. This gets to sort of the earlier thing that we were talking about before. So I bring all of that up just to say that, you know, even to the point we were just on, even within OpenAI, there's some real diversity of approaches to this larger problem. And I'm sure it's the same at Anthropic and Google, you know, as well. And what we want is we want more people with a seat at the table.

49:36So So having OpenAI being willing to release this thing into the world, support the researchers on their team, putting this together and release this out to the world is something that, I mean, look, again, they're looking to change the narrative about what's going on and how people think of them. So it has a lot of benefits for them. But it also, I think we should still think about conversations like this. And what Altman said about this document is that, look, he's been through multiple transitions. We know he's been through mobile and social and all of these. And he says, the more time we have to debate them, the public has to debate them before they become like urgent in an emergency is a good thing.

50:16And here's the one part that scared me about it. The last thing is like Altman told this story in there, you know, about sort of pre-pandemic and them sort of realizing because of the data they had that the pandemic was coming and it was going to be pretty bad. And he talked about like this moment where more powerful models are about to be released as sort of like that. And that sort of gave me pause of like, he's a little scared, right? He's a little scared that these new models are coming and they could cause some problems. And before they get out there, let's like at least get the conversation going.

50:47Because like in the US, because they talked about, you know, this being a new, what we need is a new deal style set of things for AI, a new deal for AI. And we're so far from that right now in the US, The conversation around AI is so, you know, rudimentary and so, you know, early that we're so far from that. And so I think we need more of these kinds of things. And that's why, you know, shows like this are great, right, where we can help get some of those discussions started.

51:14Ant Pruitt:It's really a shame how far behind we are. And the country we're far behind of is China, which is which is banned, you know, relationship apps for teens. It's banned all kinds of things like that. some of the dangerous things without, you know, they're still full speed ahead on competing with the US in AI. And also all these great ideas about how to redistribute the power dynamic that comes from AI and the money and all that kind of stuff. Those are great ideas. And unfortunately, they seem unlikely given the current politics. I mean, we should be taxing high fructose corn syrup and subsidizing fresh fruits and vegetables but instead we subsidize high fructose corn syrup like there's a million things like that that we're doing the opposite of what we should be doing for the common good for the for the public benefit and so we just need we just need a better politics is what we need yeah good luck yeah The one thing that was interesting about the concept of taxing the companies that have the, you know, sort of using AI, you know, to invest their process.

52:26Well, if they're smart, you have your agent go out and find you every possible loophole, which is way better than a good shyster finding you. It's true. They're very good at that. Right. So, I mean, yes, it's a brilliant idea. And I think it should happen that way. But trust me, you me, they're going to figure out where they can get some holes in and like how they can put money in some certain places and have it feed. like there was a thing before where amazon had to come in and basically eliminate the process of um using gift cards because they were untaxable because the money doesn't really exist and when that happened i remember like that messed up a whole bunch of people who were basically using zip uh gift cards as a loophole and it seems so weird the people that don't know about it they have no i did what they missed but the people that knew about it they were buying literally hundreds of thousand dollars with the gift cards and never paying taxes on it because the money

53:21Ant Pruitt:was never real so to speak that's wait a minute so you could convert your money into amazon gift cards spend those like amazon costco gasoline but ruth chris steakhouse but why is it taxable i mean that money was income to begin with i don't understand how that's yeah it was a weird thing uh this was probably uh is it was middle 2000s and then they were like no so you couldn't convert i do remember that yeah so okay so for instance um i gotta find me some good loopholes you were i i would get i'm an idiot i pay my taxes right i would get a lot of amazon affiliate income because i made a video about changing an ssd and a mac and some famous musician got a hold of it and he saved this concert and he tweeted about it so you take it in gift cards instead of correct correct so and then it's not income correct so what happened he he put the tweet out all of a sudden my amazon affiliate revenue goes up into like eight nine grand and then i would just turn that into gift cards say don't give me any cash and now they don't let you do it they'll let you do it like funny money you can't tax you can use amazon gift cards but you couldn't turn it into like you know buy an xbox or buy some plane tickets or other stuff one last thing before we move on OpenAI is backing a bill according to Wired.

54:39Ant Pruitt:It's an Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable, even in cases where their products cause mass death or financial disasters. Yeah, I bet OpenAI is backing that. I would like, though, because where's this bill for the sugar people? Like, we're scared of a lot of things, but sugar is killing us faster. Or the gambling concerns. i mean there's a lot of businesses in this country that are not good for children and other living things but we don't ban them you know it's funny about this should kelsey i can never say this stupid calci yeah like yeah come on dudes like the minute we start getting uh bet companies tacked onto our uniforms like they do in the uk we we've definitely changed the thing so again we're looking we're you know that thing um leo when the guy used to come around comdex and he would always do like sleight of hand and he'd be talking to you shake your hand next you know he's holding your watch yeah he's always walking around all the computers yeah i forget his name but he's a vegas resident which is basically trying to drum up people to come to his show right that's what we're doing we're yelling at my watch by the way you know who he is and worry i want my watch back okay dude all the other people are still doing the crazy stuff while we're yelling at ai just like while they're distracted by ai let's go change some drug policies or you know get another Everybody's looking at Sam Ullman.

56:00Ant Pruitt:Meanwhile, Elon's getting trillions of dollars in government funding. Yes, it's so that. But back to this protecting the, think of the ag companies, protecting them from critical harms. SB34344. One of the funny spins about this is basically it would essentially retain the illegality of murder for humans, but essentially make it legal for AI. AIs. And it's also, it's really in response to the liability that ChatGPT and others have for the suicides of people's children. But also they're, yeah, exactly. And they're also concerned if somebody creates a bioweapon using AI or something, they don't want to be held liable for any of that stuff.

56:49Ant Pruitt:A little more approximate, yeah. When they're looking ahead to the future of agentic AI, they don't want to be held liable if the AI just wakes up one morning and says, hey, I think I'm going to just go cause mayhem somewhere. But I think we need to be careful about these blankets. So I think there has to be a lot of pressure on companies to make sure those kinds of things don't happen. It's another Amazon gift card loophole. There, remember that - Only with murder. Dario Amandai said, after the Pentagon controversy that he said this on CBS News, the interview um first interview he did after it i believe it was um that the company was not necessarily against uh these machines or ais being able to have lethal capabilities what he was against was that the the technology was not good enough in its current form to be reliable to do it and so i think that's a really important distinction to make and that's not to you know, I gave them some credit earlier for doing what they did, but I think people are running around saying like they're, they're blanket against it.

57:57They're not actually, they're, they're like, their, their thing was that these models are not good enough. They're not accurate enough. They're not reliable enough in their current form to do it. And they didn't want to be responsible.

58:09Ant Pruitt:And the Pentagon isn't reliable enough in its current form. And I think they suspect that if they used Anthropic to do some weapons thing, the weapon went and did some horrible uh act right they know the pentagon would blame anthropic well don't we think uh palantir was involved in the targeting of that children's school uh the girls school that was destroyed in the first bombing in iran as the war began don't we think that that was there's some this debate over how that was targeted that story is out there yes yeah and we know palantir uses anthropic um and is widely used for military purposes i mean let's Although it's used for many things, it's also used for choosing chairs, apparently, in the Department of Agriculture.

58:54Here's the strange thing that's kind of hard to wrap a head around. Because we've gone through this with gun manufacturers, right? And then even if you go to like Atwood, Samson, Ravenox, these are U.S. rope companies, bro. No one's ever sued a rope company for the amount of suicides or the stuff my people went through a couple years back. Like, we can't go back and sue the rope companies. it was the the idiots wielding the rope it's the people yeah you know what i'm saying and like if i thought i could do a class action lawsuit against raven on samson and u.s rope i would have done it already right you know what i mean so it's it's such a weird thing but it just looks weird when they try to push forward well you know what i mean no matter what even if ai does

59:37Ant Pruitt:something like that it's going to be a human behind it ultimately right it's always there's always going to be a human right in the same way that that school that was hit was just horrible right like it's it's you know reprehensible let's also remember that that government built that elementary school right next to their nuclear facility for a reason because they didn't want people to aim at it because for they were worried shield it would they were using them as they were using children as a human shield right so it's a it's a complex story there's some debate over whether it was you know old information that was the problem there's a lot of debate over it so i don't i don't necessarily cast aspersions on anthropic or palantir but that's part of the discussion that was in the air and that's one of the reasons i for sure for sure debate happened let's take a break come back with more that's enough ai enough enough i know i just hear people in my head going enough ai or maybe that's my ai i don't know it could be before the show we were having a fine conversation with uh with obi-wan over my rabbit uh great panel good to have you Jason Heiner, Doc Rock, Mike Elgin, dear friends all.

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1:01:59Ant Pruitt:slash twit that's ziprecruiter.com slash twit meet your match on zip recruiter ziprecruiter.com slash twit we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech it is good i should say it is good to be just as it was good for levi's to be the company that made the blue jeans for the gold miners it is good to be the provider nvidia has done very well samsung which has had financial issues in the past few years says they had an eight-fold jump in profit this quarter because AI chip demand. They do make chips and it's been very bad. AI has been very, very good for them. So$37.92 billion in profit for the first quarter.

1:02:51Ant Pruitt:Yikes. It's good working to get it. A big chunk of the Korean economy, right? Oh, yeah. A huge chunk of it. Yeah. You know what else is doing all right? Not XAI. SpaceX, I remember last year had, I think,$8 billion in profit. But remember, they merged or Elon merged XAI with SpaceX. XAI, his AI company, which is a money loser, with SpaceX, which is a moneymaker. And as a result, the resulting beast with two backs,$5 billion loss last year. $18.5 billion in revenue, but they lost$5 billion. Not SpaceX, really. I think it was XAI. x uh xai well spacex because that's all called spacex now spent heavily this is according to the information spent heavily on chips and data centers for xai with 13 billion dollars in capital expenditures expenditures that's 50 more than they spend on rockets and satellites combined so we know what business they're in now speaking of which by the way congratulations Congratulations to NASA.

1:04:06Ant Pruitt:Real success with Artemis. And I think we were all watching the whole, I don't know about you, I was watching the whole mission with just joy in my heart. We needed some good news and fascination. I know there's probably no real reason we should be going to the moon or Mars, but it sure is inspiring to watch people get together, people from all over the world get together and accomplish something so remarkable. I, I, uh, I just made me feel good. Yeah. I mean, what's the reason to do anything? I mean, we want to achieve things. We want to, it's like, it's like a fantastic thing. And I also think it, this whole event showed where we're at in terms of prioritizing bad news over good.

1:04:50Ant Pruitt:The fact that it all went so well meant that most people, I mean, we're all, we're all, we're all nerds. And so we were super into it, but the the public at large was kind of indifferent to the story because is that true nobody was you know i just watched the martian uh because i really i love andy wears works his books and uh i had just seen uh project hell mary and i lisa and i had a little friendly debate which is better the martian or project hell mary and having just seen project hell mary i said i think it's as good as the martian we watched the martian last night no it's not the martian's better brilliant and And there's a moment in The Martian, you know, spoiler, could I spoil this movie that's 10 years old now?

1:05:32Ant Pruitt:I don't think so. Where the final bit of the mission to rescue The Martian and everybody around the world, they're all standing in Times Square watching the TV screens and stuff like that. That happened in 1969 when we walked on the moon. I don't know if that happened for Artemis. In fact, I know it didn't. But there was interest or am I wrong? Maybe it was just us nerds. There was interest, but there wasn't nearly enough interest. There was a lot of interest around the quality of the photos that they were sending back. That was pretty amazing. I think in terms of volume, though, right? In terms of volume, probably more people saw this than Apollo.

1:06:10That's a good point.

1:06:12Ant Pruitt:There's more people to see it. There's more people in the world. Yeah, there's like twice as many people in the world. The other thing is everybody's connected now, right? And everybody, much more so than they were in 1969. and by the way the technology for photography and and transmitting those photographs back to earth is so much better yeah i will say the thing for me as i'm watching this splashdown and this is not intentionally morbid but it's a little morbid um being from hawaii and remembering i was in hawaii in 86 watching you know this come back and remembering challenger like i'm just sitting there watching it with a different level of paying attention well it's true we've seen disaster we know it's not safe that it's very risky so what i'm sitting there we're watching this and my other half is on the couch and then like when the first drag shoots come out i'm like okay that's good and then i'm like and then they cut away you know she's like what happened i go okay that's now we're gonna get three we're gonna get the big three and then she's like like what are you talking about just hold that lady stop talking because i'm legit squeezing i i'm having some sphincter tension waiting for the the actual touchdown that will not be the show title i promise and she it she was young at the time right we're 11 years gap and so in 86 so she didn't remember it she would have been nine so she knew it from school but like not the same way as you know i'm sitting there looking at it at 19 a little bit different but i remember just like a sense of release once you know you saw the water you know and then when the boats all pulled in and then she was like well what are the other guys doing well they're putting the the outer raft around the outside so because you've seen all these different boats moving around again one is camera crew one is like safety team and it was something dope about watching them walk out of the hole then i felt like i could let go and i just think a lot of people who i have talked to other friends like we all sat there and watched it with a different lens and the coverage really is much more detailed much better so much better now yeah yeah this is the furthest you've thrown a rock into space man this is the furthest we've thrown a rock like that's the whole 50 50 years and you know it weren't further this is the furthest we've ever thrown a rock yeah okay furthest humans have people in it okay yeah i i think there will be a lot of people maybe even in times square watching the next moon landing right when somebody's getting out of artemis oh yeah i don't know is that artemis 4 or i don't know which one that is it's not the next one i don't think uh then people will be paying attention i hope people can see it as a victory for the world i think it's good a good idea if you think this was unnecessary whatever or just a ploy to distract you, whatever.

1:09:07I think it's a good idea to go listen to some of what Neil deGrasse Tyson says about why we should be doing this, right? What's the case? He has a couple of different species, one at Y92, about a case for NASA and like a case for research. And so like, again, with you, I just I appreciated it just because when we were kids sitting on the floor in elementary school, watching the first couple. Sorry, Jason, I know you're not as old as us, but but it was just something And then, like, I just remember looking at that as a kid. And at the time, I'm in Beltsville, so I'm not that far from one of the NASA facilities in Maryland.

1:09:45And I just remember looking at that as a kid, like, oh, this is something we all look up to. So the amount of rocket toys we had, and then, you know, Evel Knievel had his little shuttle thing that he did a little trick in trying to jump the canyon. Like, that was our entire childhood. Lost in Space and Star Trek. People trying to do amazing, bizarre. Yeah. Like all of our toys were space oriented. Like we just knew that was going to be a thing. And then somebody just said, yeah, we're not going to spend money on that. And it just went out the window.

1:10:13Ant Pruitt:It's better doing it. You're right. We can afford it. I think it's, I think it's also revealing about the mindset where we wouldn't question for a second money, making money, Bitcoin or whatever, or we wouldn't question for a second Pentagon spending. the cost of the artist's mission in total is about 100 days of the iran right uh conflict right and you know yeah there's people questioning wars and stuff like that but my point is that why is it so controversial that we do this great thing to go into space and the engineering behind it the the just the incredible thing it's like why explore anything why understand the mating habits of you know koalas or you know it's like we want to understand you know that's yeah and it's cheap compared to so many other things yeah so no you're right thank you exploration is like probably the deepest seated human endeavor like this is the thing we do yeah facts i just i feel like there's a lot of hype about how we're gonna live on the moon or even crazier live on mars that seems like just fantasy, sci-fi fantasy.

1:11:23Ant Pruitt:But maybe not. I don't know. Are we going to be an interplanetary society? I don't think so. I don't know. You think about the old school computer movies with the robots in it and the AI. That all seemed like fantasy back then. We just spent an hour. That's a good point. We're living in a fantasy world already. You're right. You're right. When you're right, you're right. I'm sure at some point in time, Mike says, hey, me and the missus, we're moving to Tuscany. And a whole bunch of his friends was like, that's a fantasy. And Mike was like, watch my suitcase. See you. Bye. And we are cutting budgets on things that probably shouldn't.

1:11:57Ant Pruitt:For instance. USAID still hurts. Yeah. Well, what about CISA? Here we are. We're in the middle of a war with Iran who has very good hackers. The new budget proposes cutting CISA's budget by 700 million. There's no director right now. Now the director they had was a problem and, you know, they got rid of him, but they don't have any replacement. They've fired many, many, many, many people from CISA. Now they want to cut their budget by$700 million for 2027. This is all a political thing because the Trump administration says that they were, A, there was waste, but more that they were being weaponized politically, which they weren't.

1:12:44Ant Pruitt:Their mission was to secure federal networks, civilian networks against and critical infrastructure against cyber attacks. And believe me, that's something we don't want to cut back on right now. It wasn't focused on censorship. That's only because Trump didn't like it when in 2020, Chris Krebs, the director, said, oh, the 2020 election was the most secure election in history. Trump didn't like that. So now he's punishing them. But guess what? guess who gets punished school safety programs uh we're facing especially with ai more dramatic cyber attacks than ever before

1:13:32Ant Pruitt:yep it's uh yeah it's very it's very personal with our president yeah it's too personal unfortunately congress stopped him last time uh i'm bringing this up so you can write your Congress critter and say, you know what? This is a very important agency and we really need it. And now is not the time. You know, it was wild to me the last couple of weeks. I mean, I had a couple of flights, you know, during the whole TSA people working for free type of situation. And then I had a wild dawn, you know, dawn of me situation. The whole reason why we even have TSA was based off of, you know, World Trade Center attacks way back in the day.

1:14:15And here we are going to an actual war situation. And then we're going to try to mess with the TSA guys. I like that made about as much sense as screen doors on the submarine to me. And then I saw one the other day, which is even more wild. Oh, now we're going to go after the NFL for, um, what is that thing called? Uh, not monopolistic practices, but like a competition blocking.

1:14:38Ant Pruitt:Antitrust, yeah, because the NFL has an antitrust exemption that allows them to negotiate as a group. But you know that's about not being able to buy the Buffalo Bills like way back in freaking 92 or whatever. I'm like, bro, are you joking? It's another grudge? A hundred percent. I'm like, are you absolutely joking me? Because you're buddies with a whole bunch of these guys. But now some way you were sleeping and somebody brought up not being able to buy the Buffalo Bills and having to start a USFL team. And the next day we got the DOJ attacking the NFL. They need to be attacked. That's what I said.

1:15:11And the NFL got issues, but son. Yeah, I'm not sure they should have an antitrust exemption. There we go.

1:15:16Ant Pruitt:The point was that you can't have all these teams negotiating individually. There we go. That they, yeah. It's crazy. This is completely a grudge. It's so stupid. Closer to home, Trump also cut the CIS's protection against disinformation, firing 130 employees. And that's another one where you're like, wait a minute, is the disinformation, anti-American disinformation situation getting better or worse? It's clearly getting worse. And yet they cut that. X said that they killed 800 million bot accounts last year. 800 million bot accounts last year. And that's definitely not all of them. Russia. No, take a look at X.

1:16:00Ant Pruitt:It's filled with it. Yep. And it's for the same reason, because in general, especially the Russian disinformation was in favor of Donald Trump's re-election. And therefore, that wasn't disinformation. That was good stuff. Exactly. So it's just way too personal with the president for my taste. And I think this is the only explanation for these kind of cuts. It just makes no sense. If you're thinking we're more secure than ever, I know a lot of you have used CPUID, their CPUZ program, their HW monitor. We've recommended these tools for 30 years now for measuring performance of your PC. It was infected with malware.

1:16:45Ant Pruitt:The site was hijacked. And instead of downloading HW monitor, you're getting malware.

1:16:53Ant Pruitt:This happens again and again. there have been two supply chain attacks uh recently on ai light llm on npm no that was on pi pi as the python library that was hijacked for 45 minutes enough time for tens of thousands of people to download it it was a stealer credential stealer and then axios which is on i think npm is also a very widely used by among other things open claw and cloud code and that was a hijacked it's not like we're suddenly in a a world where there's no cyber threats anymore yeah and gta6 the dev developer rockstar games was hacked ransomware group said we're going to leak all of your customers data if you don't give us a ransom the shy it was the shiny hunters so uh i mean i don't know what what how much rockstar knows about its customers i guess they got credit card numbers this is all this this is all from this week this is ripped from the headlines i mean rockstar is the biggest game developers they're one of the largest of all oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah they have a i mean i just don't know what do they have they have your credit card you might have a little more than that on you uh but it's not just uh bad guys the fbi has figured out a way to retrieve encrypted signal messages.

1:18:22Ant Pruitt:They're using iPhone notifications. So this is the first thing anybody watching this show should do is turn off your signal notifications because you notice when you get a signal message, they come in and clear text. Well, Apple stores them and those are preserved even when you delete the message. 404 Media says the FBI was able to use it to recover deleted signal messages by extracting data in the device's notification specifically signal has a feature where you can tell it to give you the message in the notification right that hands that data to the notification system and this user had that feature turned on you should turn that off turn that off signal user uh i don't know who the bad guy was but the point is the fbi is perfectly willing to do that it has the ability so if you've been thinking oh i'm using signal we should be we should be secure i'll give you one more ice says yeah yeah we're using uh you know that software that's created by the israeli company paragon the one that gives you zero click takeovers of people's iphones yeah we're using that uh it's called graphite the agency signed a two million dollar contract with paragon at the end of the biden administration the contract was paused by the biden administration saying whoa wait a minute hold on do we really want to be doing that of course trump administration revived it last fall uh whatsapp was one of the targets of this they disclosed early last year that 90 journalists and members of civil society in various countries were targeted with graphite

1:20:07Ant Pruitt:and uh the ice is using it and i'm sure they're only using it to go after the worst of the worst right only the bad guys only the very very worst of the worst and your landscaper

1:20:25Ant Pruitt:you better not take my landscaper you better not touch him uh uh all right one more one more story a supply chain story but it's not a security story but it does have to do with uh the war in iran helium helium is uh used in the manufacture of uh semiconductors it's also used in medical instruments and most of our helium comes from underground pockets where the natural gas collects it's not a byproduct of natural gas but it is produced with natural gas extraction the helium comes up in the pocket they save it they sell it they ship it through where oh the straight of hormos thanks to the closure of the straight helium prices have spiked businesses are scrambling to deal with looming shortages we did you know the u.s used to have a strategic helium reserve but that was sold off 2024 oh boy so it's using chip manufacturing and yeah um and so if if that if it's not resolved it could actually um bring semiconductor manufacturing to a to a you thought we had a shortage get ready yeah it's used in mri machines as well yeah mri that's right yeah it's got a really low can't buy computers anymore anyway that's a good point if you have a computer you can buy no no but let's be fair you can buy it you just can't buy any ram and you can't buy a video card but you can get you know an ssd or an ssd but you buy the case there's plenty of cases available and fans all the fans you want otherwise there's a site for computer parts called only fans only fans that's it did you just think of that yeah i did sorry you should start that site i did i was talking to somebody the other day and uh you know this conference i was speaking at last week was all about content creators this thing i'm going to in england where was that conference uh it was in seattle and but the one we're going to in england is called tube fest and you know i'm like for the guys who are still sitting on this process of i need to wait till i get a new camera or a new something in order to do things like this content creating is going to become more expensive very very quickly um as it stands now an sd card that i was buying for 34 bucks like a couple months ago is now 120 some odd bucks for the same little sd card i'm like you really got to get used to shooting on your phone and just enjoying it because the phone is dope it already has the memory it already has the storage and you just got to get it post it upload it and And then people like me who hoard all of their B-roll and their excess footage got to delete it because I just bought a 20 terabyte helium drive that I swear I paid$2.89 for in December.

1:23:28I bought his twin sister like two weeks ago. It was 700 bones. Oh, that's more than three times more expensive. I had to do it because Synology was like, hey, dude, you need some more space. And so, OK, cool. I'll buy another drive. And I had every intention to go buy two more drives. And I know you're not. You can buy one. It's just freaking insane. So Benito is so right right now. Drive prices and memory prices are so crazy. It's kind of insane. And everyone's blaming it on the AI stuff because it's an easy scapegoat. It's not just that. It's supply chain issues, which Leo is trying to tell you.

1:24:03But no one wants to hear that because it's so much easier to blame it on AI. And I swear to you, I would love one day for us to get out and do a deep dive report on AI facilities aren't using as much water as the media likes to put out. a lot of times they're using dirty water or non-potable water but it's just reported as water and so all these people are up in arms about how much water ai is using them like you know what

1:24:27Ant Pruitt:uses a lot of water golf courses thank you how many golf courses where i live leo you've been here golf course and well there's what's weird is there's golf courses in the deserts right they love them in arizona they love them in las vegas uh forget the data centers let's get rid of the golf courses the golf courses have actually turned palm springs into an ecosystem that's no longer a desert oh yeah it's humid in palm springs so crazy that's your water that's your water right there going in the air yeah but again it's so easy to blame ai because ai is scary and nobody knows what it is unless they listen to this show right and like i mean yeah it has some wild things but it's also in the hospitals when you have to go through many many many many many cases to try to figure out this rare form of, you know, a buddy of mine who's just recently diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer.

1:25:21And they find it faster because the hospitals can comb through the data really quickly, you know, and here we are trying to plan a fundraiser in a couple of weeks. And people are mad, you know, because of AI. And I'm like, yo, they might not have never caught it if it wasn't for the ability for them to comb through this data really quickly. So we just got to get better at balancing pros and cons in general we've become so binary that it's crazy like and binary about dumb stuff like xbox versus ps2 or whatever or playstation sorry this is dumb

1:25:54Ant Pruitt:like we have i did i confess i bought a switch two before the price hike you're genius i should have i didn't i looked and i said it's still 449 i know that's way too much and i don't really need it but it's only going to be more. So I'm buying it now. It's so crazy. All right, let's take a break. Enough of that. Enough gloom and doom. Let's talk about some happy stuff. Like, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Now there's another theory. There's a new theory. There's always a theory. You're watching This Week in Tech, Jason Heiner, Doc Rock, Mike Elgin, great to have all three of you. Jason, tell me about the Deep Review.

1:26:38Ant Pruitt:Yeah. So the Deep View, I joined in December, December 1st. Congratulations. That must have been a little risky feeling. A little, for sure. So I'd been working in traditional media for a long time, but I had two things that really sort of crystallized for me in 2025, five, which is that I had this thesis about media. The future of media is about direct relationships with the audience, you know, deeper relationships with more specific audiences. So I like that. That's kind of what we do. Yeah, exactly. Less algorithms sending you users and more you convincing people that you're, you have something that they would like and them subscribing to you.

1:27:25Right. So it's various forms, newsletters, podcasts, other, other ways. Then I really wanted to work on, I really wanted to work on that specifically. And then I, the other theory I had was that I was not keeping up in AI, that AI was moving so quickly that things were, were rapidly and that we were about to sort of, you know, hit this new gear and I was already not keeping up. And so I wanted to spend all day talking about it, thinking about it, writing about it, learning about it. And I knew that I couldn't keep up otherwise.

1:27:57Ant Pruitt:Yeah. That's kind of, I think we've all done that. I did that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the interesting thing is in, you know, so I came to the Deep View. I started in December and that was the month. And as a matter of fact, Leo, you were one of the first ones that said this to me because I was on shortly after I joined and you had just, there was a new version of Claude Code that came out in December. November 24th of 2025 was when, in my opinion, everything changed. And it was the release of Opus 4.5. I remember you were telling me, you're like, I'm using Claude code to do all kinds of things that aren't just coding, you know, like it's a, it's a true agent.

1:28:34And you were showing me some of these things before the show started. And I was like, Whoa, this is different. Um, and of course, since then, like, you know, with open claw, with the new Claude co-work, um, perplexity computer, you know, all of these things now codecs, um, from open AI, all of these things have just taken, um, everything to it, to another level. And so I'm, I'm so glad that I started when I did, because I would not have been able to absorb or keep up. I'm barely am now, you know, with all of these things. And so I'm thrilled. So the deep view, just to bring it back, you know, it's a newsletter.

1:29:10It started two and a half years ago. It's been on some amazing trajectory now over half a million audience, audience of over half a million is growing by like 40 or 50 ,000 new signups a month. And we have this perspective that there's a lot of information out there that is very surface level. And so we're trying to just give you three stories a day, the top three stories, and give you a double click on those three in the main newsletter. And then they also brought me in to do other things. So we're also doing a podcast. We are doing long form. So we launched our first long form two weeks ago that was about.

1:29:52So it said the title is AI's utopian story masks a race for power. And it's about the fact that AI tells this story about what it's about. But at the end of the day, it's also centralizing power in a smaller and smaller number of hands. And that's dangerous and sort of anti-competitive. All of these things, it brings up a lot of challenges, can bring up. So just raising the flag on that. And it's interesting because we published that story, you know, in March. And I'm not claiming this, but I will say that it is an interesting parallel that all of the big labs have started talking about this idea that they want to see this powerful technology democratized.

1:30:37They don't want to see it in as few hands. And so if we contributed anything, our drop to the ocean in that dialogue, I'm thrilled. And so that's more, we're going to be doing more of that. We have more long forms coming up. That's one of the things that I spent a lot of time on at TechRepublic and CNET and ZDNet and something that I'm really proud of and spend a lot of time thinking about, which is doing sort of deeply reported and deeply thought about issues around all of these most important things. And it's going to be really important in AI in the years ahead.

1:31:11Ant Pruitt:Couldn't have picked a better time and they couldn't have gotten a better person to run the joint. I think it's a good match. That's great. TheDeepView.com. Thank you for doing this, Jason. I read it every day. It's a pleasure. It's vital to subscribe to the newsletter for sure. Yeah, subscribe.thedeepview.com will take you straight to the subscription. It's a daily newsletter, top three stories of the day, and we double click on them and tell you kind of why they matter. We have our deeper view on each story, which is our analysis of what it is and why it matters. Very nice. Also here, Mike Elgin.

1:31:44Ant Pruitt:Great to have Doc Rock, Mike Elgin, Jason Heiner. our show today brought to you by ThreatLocker. We just were at ThreatLocker Zero Trust World in Orlando and what an amazing event. ThreatLocker is a zero trust platform. It delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions, protecting endpoints, protecting networks, that's new, now protecting the cloud too, that's also new. They announced this to Zero Trust World. By extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks. Threat Locker ensures that devices are validated through a secure broker before connecting to platforms, you know, the ones you use like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Asana, Google Workspace, GitHub, and on and on.

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1:33:59Ant Pruitt:Thank you, Rob. Not just Heathrow, JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, companies that can't afford to be brought to their knees, right? The Port of Vancouver. And, you know, this is an infrastructure play. You cannot afford to be shut down. ThreatLocker consistently receives high honors in industry recognition, their G2 high performer and best support. That's for Enterprise Summer 2025. Peer spot ranked them number one in application control, the best. GetApp gave them their best functionality and features award in 2025. With ThreatLocker, you can confidently ensure that users have access to a consistent, safe network connection.

1:34:38Ant Pruitt:Offices, remote users, internal servers, critical services can maintain smooth operations without the need to open inbound ports or deploy traditional VPN solutions. And that's really what everybody else is doing. And it just gives you an attack surface, right for the bad guys threat locker prevents that your end users will get the secure reliable internal system access they need without complex infrastructure changes get unprecedented protection quickly easily and cost effectively with threat locker visit threatlocker.com slash twit to get a free 30-day trial and learn more about how threat locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance that's threatlocker.com slash twit we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech great company with a truly wonderful product uh hesitate to say that about john deere of course they've been the focus of a lot of right to repair fighting just lost a big case 99 million dollar fine and a monumental right to repair settlement but it's not just the money uh john deere is going to make is forced to make digital diagnostic maintenance and repair tools available to third parties for the next decade huge victory for right to repair they have fought it hard um as farmers buy these very expensive farm machinery and then can't fix it they have to go to john deere to fix it in in in some cases it's been really problematic they've had to go because they want to fix it themselves to weird third-party software from the ukraine for instance to unlock their home repaired tractor uh this is not good it's also skyrocketed the cost of used john deere equipment um the cost of older tractors doubled but farmers wanted them because they could repair them sixty thousand dollars for a 40 year old tractor yeah good deal i'll take it you got any more judge still has to approve the settlement that seems likely there's another lawsuit from the FTC also about right to repair.

1:37:06Ant Pruitt:So it's not over for John Deere, but this is a really important victory. And I wanted to pass this along for right to repair. We're big fans of right to repair. And it's, I think, very, very important. It's like cars, right? Like vintage, you can fix those. Yeah. I mean, it's true that a lot of modern cars, my car, I have a BMW also, Doc Rock, but it's one of the electric ones. And there's no way a shade tree mechanic can fix this thing. You'd have to have all the equipment, right? They don't want to touch it. It's funny when you open it and you see the shroud and it's like, yeah, they don't want me touching nothing in here.

1:37:45Don't go in here. It's no user-servisable parts.

1:37:49Ant Pruitt:In fact, it was so bad. I went to, I needed new tires and the tire guy said, oh no, it's an EV. I can't go near it. He wouldn't replace the tires. you you you have to have the exact circumference down otherwise you mess up all myriad sorts of things and so even when i was getting the dealer to fix it she said can you walk around and tell me what it says on your tires i had to read i had to read the labels on the tires to her she said oh good yeah okay that's good so is that a good trade-off for you you think oh uh yeah well nowadays with gas in california the gas station down the block is six dollars and 50 cents a gallon yeah which is crazy that's the first time i've seen it higher than hawaii but we're like 570.

1:38:32but it's so funny when you drive by you look at everybody else they're all pissed

1:38:35Ant Pruitt:off and screaming and we just like oh and our european uh listeners are going what what so what that's nothing yeah you should see what we pay for a liter what did it do you know what the gas prices are in the tuscany right now trains uh just bought gas they did yeah they charge it by liter It sounds like a good price until you realize you're only getting a liter. But yeah, it's like basically double, I think, something like that. The price of gas generally. Darren in Australia says$3 a liter in Australia. So the problem is - Is that Aussie dollars though? That might be Aussie dollars. That's Aussie dollars.

1:39:13Ant Pruitt:And the price is not even across the country. While we pay$6.50 in California, because we have kind of draconian rules about refining, uh general tab says 389 in massachusetts but that's still higher isn't it yeah well every time i go to mass and you know i get gas before i go back to logan to drop the car off i'm always like dude i wish i could put something in my suitcase i know well hawaii well but they but i mean well it still has to get shipped everywhere anyway right yeah we have a refinery but the crew got to get shipped here right and we have that i don't know if everybody remembers this because unless you live someplace like this you don't really think about it but there's this thing called the jones act so even if i buy something from japan or china or whatever it goes all the way to freaking la or alaska first and then comes back so our shipping like i wanted to order a bunch of filament from bamboo they had a killer sale and the shipping for the filament cost more than 12 rows of filament i was like this is really stupid man that's the jones act says something what american shipping has to go through an american port something like that yeah like this is not a state this is always so dumb about it because we are an american hawaii is not a state well it is you know i know when you take a cruise they have to stop in one international port if like on your alaska cruise they have to stop in canada just briefly yeah it's just like who comes up with these idiotic rules and it makes it's protectionism it's just i'm sure there's protection histories uh speaking of protection frank frank my favorite country frank you're going to france uh you're driving to france uh a couple of days right mike tomorrow tomorrow morning driving to paris's government is you should do some coverage of this they're ditching windows for linux yeah saying us tech dependence is a strategic risk it's a trend although a lot of european cities have done yeah yeah yeah in germany etc and and you know china of course has been trying to do this sort of this kind of thing for a long time uh yeah it's there was gonna be tough they covered this on the title linux show there was something going on with open office last month uh they began a project to take open office and make it euro office in order to gain independence from microsoft office but some of the open office people were a little bit upset they said it's a licensing violation um because the euro office codebase removed the gpu agpl license which you're which they saw it was unenforceable and non-obligatory but in fact that's the whole point of the gpl license is if you fork a project you have to have the same license you can't just up to say well now it's ours so there's a big kerfuffle in the open source community over open office and euro office is not the best name i'm sorry doesn't it doesn't sound good um did you see what red hat did now we were talking about ibm earlier and of course ibm's shameful history of collaborating with the nazis during world war ii their tabulating machines were used to tabulate jews in the holocaust um i don't are Are they at it again?

1:42:53Ant Pruitt:Red Hat, which is owned by IBM, is trying to scrub a white paper from the internet. Their white paper was titled Compress the Kill Cycle with Red Hat Device Edge, showing how it was faster to use Red Hat's products and technologies to, well, kill people.

1:43:20Ant Pruitt:um of course there's nothing disappears on the internet and in fact the minute you try to shut it down yeah as mike masnick calls it the streisand effect uh people become aware of it wait was it the streisand effect yes did you know that mike masnick coined that term i didn't know it either he told me he was the first to call it the streisand effect uh that remember because barbara strice ended during her wedding there were helicopters flying over and taking pictures and she sued which of course nobody was interested in the pictures of her wedding until until they sued she sued yeah so in this paper uh they talk about the find fixed track target engage assess process to uh for the strategic operational and tactical uh levels delivering real-time data from sensor pods directly to airmen accelerating the sensor to shooter cycle you know it's better with linux everything's better with linux i mean i don't know you served uh in iraq was it a dark rock or was it afghanistan south america and in kuwait kuwait that's right you went back to the operation whatever what was that uh shock in awe yes it's um i think if it's our military you kind of want them to have the best technology right yeah again this i i hate this i hate i hate hate hate the terminology slippery slope it's because it's just overdone too many times however this is really one of those weird things where like you know i could help us in situations like this or all of the capabilities can help us situations like this but unfortunately the checks and balances become a little bit unattainable you know if it's my boy on the front line or my yeah not my daughter on the front line i want her to have the best technology to defend herself correct and to defeat the enemy but if your son's in the front line we are all distracted by good food he'll be in he'll be in the uh in the kitchen in the KP there doing the sandwiches.

1:45:33I mean, both sides are distracted by the food. Like, hey, fight's over. Let's eat. Somebody crack open the ball of the Chianti that Uncle Mike sent to us. Even in France, they

1:45:43Ant Pruitt:love his French dip, I just wanted to say. And that's a dance move. I'm surprised they call it Liberty Dip in the United States. Oh, that's super funny. I know. Anyway, way. Yeah. You know, I'm really conflicted. This is... Well, I think the biggest problem with this for them, it's of course an IBM company, is that, you know, it's the way it's written. It's not that they're bragging about their technology. It's just very blunt language in the document about killing and this, that, and the other thing. And it's just not this, you know, I think if they could rewrite it with euphemisms and you know soften every the language i think they wouldn't mind that it was out there it's also hilarious that they think they can scrub something from the internet i mean that's not happening no it's not happening and they should know that no um this one is a little disturbing you may remember the department of justice went after ticket master we all cheered when we heard that news um but apparently the doj settled with ticketmaster and live nation a surprise settlement and they did not consult the litigators before they made that settlement they end around it went and around them and and settled and ended it and apparently the litigators aren't too happy the U.S.

1:47:15Ant Pruitt:Justice Department's top antitrust litigator and three senior trial attorneys now leaving the agency because of that deal with Ticketmaster.

1:47:28Ant Pruitt:So now I wasn't up on, I know why we were going after Ticketmaster. I wasn't up on the settlement. Apparently it wasn't the best settlement. That stopped short of a breakup. it allowed live nation to keep ticket master apparently it came as a shock to the other dozen states that had signed on to the lawsuit and in fact more than 30 of them continued the trial so the trial didn't end even though the u.s pulled out of it the justice department acting director of civil antitrust litigation david dalquist announced his resignation wednesday during a hearing in the government's case against google for illegally monopolizing the online search industry at the hearing he said uh your honor i've given my notice so here's my colleague he's going to take over see ya and it's just a larger trend in the executive branch nowadays is they do what they want and they don't feel like they are part of a thing with other with states with other agencies they just do what they want and uh it's too bad so well and and i think biden uh under lena khan was very aggressive in antitrust enforcement yes and uh his successor perhaps did not fully agree with that and has backed down on a lot of those cases the administration actually fired a wreck filed a record number of cases more monopolization lawsuits than any time since the trust busting era of the early 1900s trump has moved the trump justice department has moved to settle several of them and hasn't challenged a merger since january uh 2025 what happened in january 2025 they haven't challenged a merger since what was what was i think it was inauguration day i think something or the seminal moment oh that moment oh yeah no more no more which is you know what it's good if you if you're one of the big companies looking to uh to merge with another big company it's a great time to be a billionaire it is yes and if i were one i would be celebrating there's a show title if i if only i were a rich man it's funny i do often say you know people get so mad at the things that are going on whatever and i'm like you know i fully agree with you and i'm not saying that this is right but trust you me if you was on the other side of this fence you would think differently they're like no no no i would be different i go everybody says that every young politician goes into the thing like i'm going to change this i'm going to stop the bozacity that's goes no thank you guy kawasaki for the word uh for of what's going on and then they get there and they find out they can't do it they either get pushed back out of office or they end up succumbing to some lobbyist somewhere and there's just countless stories of you know people trying to get in there and i really don't have a solution i don't know what it is but it's funny to think that you would be different if you weren't in that in that particular boat and then even it's funny because in in leo and i's favorite sport which is f1 yes like i'm watching it right now bro i'm watching right now because there's nothing to watch this month because the tables have turned the races were in bahrain and saudi arabia not right now the best place to gather hundreds of thousands of people into one small area really really wild but like when the tables turn like now everybody's mad and you know max is threatening again to quit because he can't just win every time for doing whatever i know i like it that it's shaking it up but there we were talking about this last week and there i think ian thompson who is also an f1 fan hates it of course the brits hate anything that's happened to f1 since it was going to be sun and when i get to london next week there'll be sun and they'll be mad that this sunny but i think it's fun to watch them race and stuff but apparently it's a little more dangerous because they have to slow down to build up the battery i'm sorry um funny i made a comment on threads about how much i'm enjoying max losing and oh my god his fans came after me bro i was like i never had a more um interactive thread post than the amount of like yelling calling me names uh deaf threads all of the above and i was like dang dude it was i'm just literally i'm a lewis hamilton fan shut up so i'd say apple has done a nice job uh of taking over the f1 broadcast in the united states and i think they oh it looks good it's 4k now and the audio is dolby stereo and i think it's good i think i think lewis secretly had a hand in getting that deal done he's getting paid somewhere for that because yeah because now suddenly uh his team is competitive correct and the well you're going crazy he's executive producer for the movie Oh, the F1 movie too.

1:52:20Yeah. Yeah. So I think he had a hand in making that happen. We'll find out after he retires how much money he made during this. But I'm just saying, I like the shakeup. Everybody else is pissed off about it.

1:52:29Ant Pruitt:Speaking of billionaires, I'm sure Lewis is getting close. I'm pretty positive. Yeah. Yeah. And I kind of like Ferrari. I'm glad to see them. So do I. And McLaren kind of slipping back. And Mercedes is back, which is kind of fun. I'm sorry. we this is such i know let's talk about horse racing uh we could we could talk about that we'll talk about hats and hat boxes and safely traveling with hats there we go hat boxes usually usually a conversation on a show like this about f1 is about one of the keys on the keyboard but

1:53:10yeah yeah it's good well played mike well played yes uh let's take a break uh more to come i do

1:53:18Ant Pruitt:have that satoshi story which is kind of interesting i don't know if it's real or not but it was in the new york times so we'll get to that in uh just a little bit our show today brought to you by delete me my god if you've ever searched for your name online you know what a ridiculous situation we're in, at least in the United States, where there is no federal privacy protection. And these companies, these data brokers flourish, hundreds of them, I think there are more than 500 at last count, collecting every bit of information about you that they can gather and then selling it online. Your name, of course, your contact info, But did you know it's completely legal for them to get your social security number and sell it?

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1:55:22Ant Pruitt:And there's a reason it's a subscription service, not just a one-time service. The data brokers, sure, they'll take the stuff down. They're required to by law. And every data broker hides that page. That's one of the reasons you want to use DeleteMe because they know where to go. They have it taken down. But they're a slimy bunch. Sometimes they change their company name. Sometimes they dissolve and reemerge. Sometimes they delete the data, but then just say, well, there's another Leo Laporte. They started collecting that data. It never ends. So DeleteMe is always working for you. They constantly monitor and remove the personal information you don't want on the internet.

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1:56:35Ant Pruitt:Joindeliteme.com slash twit. Enter the code twit at checkout. that's join delete me.com twit offer code twit i could tell you it works it really works and it's a must join delete me.com twit we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech uh satoshi nakamoto a name that will live forever the inventor of bitcoin but who the hell is satoshi many journalists many magazines many many books have been written saying we figured out who it is newsweek had it on the front cover it was wrong it was really spectacularly wrong there have been people who claim to be the inventor of bitcoin proven wrong in court it really is a mystery and there's a reason why it's interesting besides the fact that he invented something so interesting is that he holds a huge dollar bitcoin yeah he would be worth more than a hundred billion dollars and nobody's moved those satoshi coins in years he disappeared is is is he a single person is he a group is he gone is he dead is he still alive no one knows now Now, given the value, we don't know his password.

1:57:57The simplest solution is probably the most accurate, which may be that they've lost the password to all those.

1:58:02Ant Pruitt:Well, but also you don't want to be the finger to Satoshi because you are now a target for kidnappers, for extortion. I mean, suddenly the world's going to beat a path to your door. So you may know the name John Carreyrou. he was the wall street journal reporter who exposed elizabeth holmes and the theranos scandal did some really good investigative reporting at the journal he's now at the times and i think if you read the article i think he kind of became obsessed a little bit with tracking down satoshi he spent a year it says digging through thousands of decades old internet postings in search of Bitcoin's creator.

1:58:47Ant Pruitt:My quest to solve Bitcoin's great mystery. 17 years, Bitcoin's creator has been hidden behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, I'm reporting on this just because the Times gave it a lot of play on April 8th. I don't know if it's true. You may have, I don't know if you saw the uh hbo documentary money electric the bitcoin mystery in which the documentarian claimed to have unveiled at least his reasoning about who was satoshi a canadian software developer who has since disappeared by the way rightly so i don't want to know and i wish people would stop there was there was should i just stop should i just leave it now and not talk about it no no this is not you this is on them like it's on uh curio or whatever i it was something else we were talking about and it's like oh everyone's trying to figure out this thing and i can't remember what it is i'm like i kind of just don't want to know like i think this one is just the mystery we don't really need to know do we don't know and it'll be disappointing it's like the wizard of oz effect i i just made that up no that's not true but like hey no attention to the man behind the curtain you don't know the little dudes behind the curtain right like there's some things you just want to know like oh did you know what's inside uh a slim gym no shut up oh you really don't want to know that i don't want to know no you don't want there are countries where you have to label that stuff and uh i saw one that's just it said pig's anal glands that's the whole that was the whole thing and you're right you know maybe it's delicious maybe it's nutritious maybe it's even safe to eat but you don't really want to do middle country east coasters would know actually you grew up in mass dude scrapple is delicious scrapple scrapple baby i do i never someone's like do you know what's inside scrapple shut up just don't want to know you never did scrapple is delicious all right well uh cover your ears actually i don't see this thing he's come to a conclusion I don't know if it's true And it's very thin.

2:01:02Ant Pruitt:Well, it's a lot of circumstantial evidence. If it was in court, it would be circumstantial. A lot of the linguistic patterns match. He has some odd, both Satoshi and this guy, Adam Back. Adam Back. He's a British cryptographer. I have to say, of all the people who have been proposed as Satoshi, he is the most qualified. Yeah. He was a cypherpunk. He's a cryptographer. He's been very active in Bitcoin. I mean, he could be, and among all the other suspects, the most likely to actually be Satoshi. He kind of vanished from the message boards right when Satoshi appeared. And the linguistic quirks, I've gone through all of them.

2:01:50Ant Pruitt:They're very obscure things, like ending a sentence with a word also, using British spellings for certain words, using american spellings for other words these are pretty obscure linguistic ticks that are shared by i have to point out though that carrie commissioned one of those statistical synaxin semantic analysis uh and it failed and then his conclusion is well back was probably covering so that he knew about these analyses, these statistical analyses, and intentionally obfuscated his prose so that that couldn't happen. That just does not seem very likely, right? Like, that's a very, you know, to him assuming somehow that, you know, people would be working this hard to figure out who it was, you know, so many years later, that sort of is that assumption.

2:02:47That's true.

2:02:47Ant Pruitt:That would have been kind of retroactively that he would have had to know that. Yeah. Bitcoin was going to be the successors. Here's what's funny about the whole situation too. Sorry, allow me to be Japanese major for a second. Nakamoto is in the middle of the beginning or the middle of the root. Naka means inside, the center of, or in the middle of, right? So, I know, I know, inokutabakono na nakachu means like, I am, I'm in the middle of trying to find the answer, right? So, Nakamoto itself. It has meaning. Yeah. So Yamamoto is like the base of the mountain, the center of the mountain, the origin of the mountain, right?

2:03:25Yeah. Yamamoto would be the center of the origin. Nakamoto. Right. So it's kind of interesting. Like if you are the inventor, if you are the beginning, a name that you would pick that's on the tongue, but side cheek would be Nakamoto. That's the perfect name because I'm not going to say I'm the founder. I'm not going to say I am the Gensui or the center, but I will be the center of the root or the center of the origin.

2:03:56Ant Pruitt:I wonder if Adam Back studied Japanese. Oh, yeah. So there's a very tight correlation between the UK, you know, Ingrisu, as they call it, and Japan anyway, right? Like the reason why Japan drives on that side of the road and so many of their cultural things are based on the UK. When they started to get westernized after Meiji Restoration, a lot of it formalized in sort of British oriented things. So very much so he could have had that sort of connection, you know. So this is the article they have. They start with 562 suspects. And then he provides his various pieces. And the number of suspects dwindles, dwindles down.

2:04:41Ant Pruitt:And then the suspects start to disappear. And pretty soon, he's got it narrowed. I mean, the graphics tell you it's at him back. This sounds like Jason's news organization. We're just going to keep double-clicking so we get down to the middle. It's well done. I think it's well done. uh i don't know if it's convincing he does in fact can confront back and you know he says the whole thing began when he saw the hbo documentary and he thought adam back looked a little bit squeamish when he was asked if he was satoshi i also uh think that this article is a little vague when they said that he did the reporting with the help of computer assisted reporting provided by his colleague dylan friedman computer assisted what well friedman's the ai or at least his byline says is the ai projects editor for the times yeah he has rich he has experience both as a reporter and a machine learning engineer you think ai did the research for this i do but it's it's it's interesting that they're being they're being cagey about the specifics there correct and well he does They also didn't touch on the fact that Satoshi in and of itself, Yuki is one, Satoshi, Japanese have a whole bunch of different kanjis for like clever or intelligent or whatever.

2:05:58It's why so many boys are named Satoshi or Yuki. It means clever? Yeah. So if you're going to be the intelligent or the clever origin of the beginning, I mean, it's very on the nose, bro. Like the Japanese name itself tells you it's almost invented. so I think we can completely rule out it's an actual Japanese person and the fact that it means like you're the intelligent creator of this thing like it kind of makes sense and it's a little hilarious to me you can't rule out that it's a Japanese person you can rule out that it's a Japanese person named Satoshi Nakamoto oh yeah that's true this is also true because the Japanese person would have been smarter of using that as a name that would throw everybody else off because they would actually know the literal benito i'm never saying correct but yeah or as we say talaga for benito he well bitcoin his

2:06:50Ant Pruitt:fortune is dwindling because bitcoin's down to 88 000 so his fortune is dwindling actually this story from corndesk bitcoin miners now lose 19 000 on average on every bitcoin produced because electricity has gotten so expensive. Another victim of the war in Iran, Bitcoin miners. Another win for Samsung. Another win for Samsung. Back does deny it. And he said that he doesn't know who Satoshi is. And now this is interesting that he believes that the anonymity is good for Bitcoin. And so this is one of the things that I always, I do feel like the anonymity is by design and that the folks who, it sort of seemed maybe the argument for against this is that could they have really held it that long, but it sort of seems to me like it was probably a small team and not one person.

2:07:45And, you know, like, I don't know, three or four really smart people working together. And remember, the whole reason they did this was this happened right after the financial crisis, which, you know, and they revealed they were like, look, too much. So the interesting thing is the parallels to the curtain AI crisis is they're like, there's too much control in too few organizations. So how could we build something that actually distributes control and democratizes the finance industry? And this was their solution that they came up with. So it is interesting that blockchain itself and then Bitcoin on top of it.

2:08:25So it is interesting and it is ingenious, right? The blockchain system itself, despite all of the challenges there is with the other cryptocurrencies beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, the blockchain itself is a remarkably distributed and egalitarian sort of system, despite all of the sort of negative things it's been used for since. But I think the principle still applies now too and continues to be really interesting. And I'm surprised that there haven't been more connections with sort of where we're at in the AI industry. And maybe those things are still to come. Yeah.

2:09:10Ant Pruitt:I mean, one of the consensus points I get whenever I talk to security people, whether it's at the Zero Trust World or to RSEC, is we wouldn't be in the situation we're in if it weren't for Bitcoin. because bitcoin because which situation remember prior to bitcoin if you got ransomed and ransomware they would say now go down to the 7-eleven and buy some money cards and that was not a you know a scalable business as soon as bitcoin became a predominant it ransomware took off so yes there been some positives i'm not against bitcoin uh i wouldn't i don't invest in bitcoin i'm not sure I'd recommend anybody to do that, but you still have those like three bitcoins or something, right?

2:09:54Ant Pruitt:I have 7.85 Bitcoin. Oh man. But you don't have the password for them. I can't remember the password. On the other hand, if I had remembered the password, I would have long ago gotten rid of them when they were worth a hundred bucks. I'm rich. I got$700. So it's been a blessing. And I figure quantum computing is going to come along and when it does uh yeah or maybe i can open that you should stick uh obi-wan i can ask obi-wan yeah have obi-wan work on it hey obi-wan can you help me unlock my bitcoin wallet i've forgotten the password let's see maybe you can get to work i'll give it the wallet say get to work buddy you think you're so smart what's it saying well it typically requires specific steps based on the time here are a couple of questions to help me assist you better oh good it's going to start work right now we're going to come back in a couple weeks and i was going to be in a smoking jacket with the long you know cigarette on the stick and one of those nice hats from the picture that darren sent us welcome to this week and i'm rich as i say i've suddenly become wealthy the third loving get me the martinis uh let us pause uh for our final commercial and our final stories as we continue this week in tech with the jason heiner great to have you uh jason from the deepview.com doc rock things going well at ecam oh absolutely we just released probably our dopest upgrade ever and i'm super excited about it and so i've been having a lot of fun just like sort of teaching everybody what we're doing and uh yeah it's great and we're using it that we're doing to the uk is a whole team trip so it's kind of fun to go on an adventure with the entire squad like all 10 of us are just showing oh fun okay bangers and mash for everybody is that all 10 people doing that amazing software it's kind of crazy right everyone thinks we're a way bigger team there's literally only 10 of us and there are only two developers the twins nobody else touches the code really just the twins but twin twin developer is a different level because like they kind of know what each other's thinking half the time so like i think it's a your best development partner would probably be a twin i don't know what other apps are developed by twins but i know that these guys are pretty were the thomas with the noel brothers twins i don't know the brothers that did photoshop yeah i don't know if they're twins i don't think they were twins but but they were very close.

2:12:33Yeah. I think that's really helpful when you're working with, you know, someone who you basically spent every waking moment with, because it's so much easier. And a lot of times when you get stuck on things or, I think it's funny when like Ken will add something to the app and don't tell Glenn, and then somebody in the community will say, Hey, it'd be really cool if you added this. And Glenn goes, yeah, that's a phenomenal idea. We should start on that. Ken's like, yeah, I already did it. Or vice versa. It happens all the time. It's super funny.

2:12:58Ant Pruitt:I think there's a lot to be said for a small, tight, talented team of developers as opposed to these, you know, hundreds and hundreds of developers working on the same project. I just think, you know, if it's the right project anyway. You never notice how big a large company can be so broken until you realize the way that meta in so many ways be biting one hand and sticking the other hand back in the jar. It's so weird. I'm like, Instagram would do something, but then Facebook would be like, yeah, you can't do this on video. I'm like, you literally do the same thing on Instagram. Isn't this the same company?

2:13:32Can somebody walk across the hall with a memo sheet? And it's just really weird.

2:13:36Ant Pruitt:I want to, by the way, announce our new show now that apparently my OpenClaw has debugged and opened my Bitcoin wallet this week in Billionaires. Tech Wealth Influence, the Stories Behind the Billions. We have to work on the acronym, though, because TWIB is not the best. Not the best. Oh, my God. Thank you, Darren. Darren's quick on the draw there. I least would say that's goaded.

2:14:07Ant Pruitt:And Mike Helgen also here. I'll ask you, Mike, about Machine Society and Gastronomatics in just a little bit. I want everybody to get the plugs in because I'm a big believer. But first, I must mention our sponsor for this segment of This Week in Tech, meter meter is a really cool company i saw them uh at rsac they make amazing hardware but it was founded by network engineers who had an insight it came out of pain if you're a network engineer you know what i'm talking about and believe me they know your pain the entire company lives resides needs the network it is it is the basis of every company and yet it's underfunded you've got all sorts of challenges legacy providers uh within flexible pricing those it resource constraints a complex deployments fragmented tools your mission critical to the business but you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands they decided to do something about it they founded meter and now businesses are switching to meter because it makes a big difference because meter does the whole stack they realize just like apple realized If you want to make something truly great, you've got to do the whole thing.

2:15:25Ant Pruitt:They offer full-stack networking infrastructure for wired, wireless, and cellular. They build for performance. They build for scalability. And they can do it because Meter designs the hardware, writes the firmware. They build the software. They manage the deployments. They'll even do the after-sales support. They're there for you. They do it all because they know your pain and they have a solution. meter offers everything i mean starting with isp procurement they'll help you with security routing switching wireless i mean everything you need firewalls cellular yes power that's i mean vital right dns uh dns security vpn sdwan multi-site workflows all in a single solution meters single integrated networking stack scales they are in major hospitals which is absolutely hostile environment for wireless, right?

2:16:22Ant Pruitt:They're in branch offices. You know what they told me was one of the big challenges? Warehouses. A company buys another company, they acquire all the company's warehouses. These 100 ,000 square foot football field size warehouses with wireless that just doesn't work and doesn't integrate with the home office, they can solve that. They work with large campuses. They even work with data centers. They do Reddit's data center. Asked the assistant director of technology for Web School of Knoxville. He said, quote, we had more than 20 games on campus between our two facilities. Each game was streamed via wired and wireless connections.

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2:17:39Ant Pruitt:Go to meter.com slash Twit. Book a demo. Now that's M-E-T-E-R dot com slash twit to book a demo. Thank you, meter. Only a couple of stories left. You were talking about Kalshi and Polymarket. One of the big controversies is from The Guardian. It's a Guardian investigation by Aisha Down. uh the inside story of the poly market gamblers betting millions on war uh and we've seen it it's basically insider trading right uh it started with Ukraine but now with the Iran war uh there is a huge and I think kind of reprehensible uh amount of insider betting going on polymarket before Trump was elected had about 400 million dollars a year traded on his platform today it could do 400 million in a single day and even though they're called it a production uh market it's it's it's betting right it's gambling yeah uh some states uh Nevada obviously aren't thrilled about it and have gone after them.

2:19:02Ant Pruitt:I think Arizona.

2:19:07Ant Pruitt:But it's going on. And there's a lot of money changing hands. Well, it's just, I think it's part of a larger trend where we've decided that it's okay for get-rich-quick schemes to benefit nobody. And this is one of the problems I've always had with Bitcoin, which is that where people really, it's supposed to be a currency, but for the most part, people use it as a speculative way to make a lot of money. And unlike if you invest in the stock market or something, if I invest in some company, a company's likely to be feeding somebody or building something or providing a service to somebody or doing something.

2:19:53Ant Pruitt:That's traditional investments. At some point, people are getting some good or service at the end of it and you're contributing to that. Whereas with things like Bitcoin and all this betting that's going on and literally everything, it's like nobody benefits from this. It's just some people lose a bunch of money and a few people win all that money for themselves and nobody's being clothed housed or fed uh through this to this uh thing so it's like it's like a it's just one of the malign incentives that we have in the world today that we didn't really used to have and i think it's a big problem and i think it's going to get bigger and bigger and it's not just it's not just the insider trading aspect of it um it's just the gambling it's it's the it's bringing and gambling.

2:20:42Ant Pruitt:Yeah. It's not healthy. It's not healthy. I mean, it's, you have Fox and other news networks doing deals with these companies because it's a, it's the news signal, right? Yeah. You know, it provides valuable signal on what the sentiments are out there. Right. And like Bitcoin, as Mike said, Bitcoin rises and fall purely on sentiment. It's not tied to any other, you know, aspect of anything, you know, economic. And, you know, so, so these markets are really interesting in that, but like for people who, you know, have, or, or some, some affinity and addictive personalities and that, oh my gosh, right.

2:21:22Like gambling has always been very, uh, very much strongly regulated because it's so dangerous and people can sort of lose their whole livelihoods, you know, in a matter of hours, right, or less sometimes. And so, you know, that's why, but this now opens it up and sort of is just gives it rocket fuel, which is a big challenge.

2:21:47Ant Pruitt:Fox News, CNN, and CNBC all have deals with Calci, which is one of the two big prediction markets, for their forecasts. They're going to, I mean, just as the NFL puts draft kings betting odds on every screen now the news channels are going to put the betting odds because that's really what it is oh man on the uh on their news feeds it's it's absolutely wild like when you think about it it's actually you know the what is that thing the call is coming from the inside this is right up there with the call that's coming from inside the house kind of situation it it's yeah it's it's phenomenally crazy and i agree it's amazing what you can you know you can place a bet on whether jesus christ will return before 2027.

2:22:33yeah yeah well how do you how do you look well we'll know that's the kind of thing that makes me want to do it though that makes me because i think because like mike said if jesus is your landscaper he might not come back

2:22:47Ant Pruitt:because you know by the way the odds it's only four percent odds that he will that he will Yeah, it's such a weird thing. You know, preying on the concept, this is my whole problem with just gowning in general. And I'm not going to act like I haven't done any pools. I'm not crazy. I've done pools. But preying on the concept of jumping over everybody else with a windfall in many, many areas of industry has always been somewhat, what's the word we're looking at? They're predatory, right? Whether that's like rapid weight loss or longevity for your life or preventing wrinkles or all myriad sorts of things.

2:23:33People make money basically selling some sort of fake snake oil panacea over the ability for people to jump over the line. Right. And it's kind of insane. So I was sitting, you know, again, going to the airport recently. And again, I have clear. So I'm cheating the system. but I remember when having TSA pre-check was the unlock and then all the credit card company says, Jason, if you sign up for TSA pre-check, we'll go ahead and pay for that a hundred bucks or the 85 bucks, whether you did global entry or regular. And so now having pre-check is not even a win because the pre-check line is longer than the standard line on many airports.

2:24:15And again, And only saving grace is having clear because you just walk in. And to Leo's point a while back, what makes clear the cheat code? Because for whatever reason, I can afford to spend 200 bucks a year on clear and other people ain't going to do that.

2:24:31Ant Pruitt:The rich get rich. But as a person who's flying at least twice a month, it's worth every cent to me. But there are certain things that happen on the prediction markets that make me want to do it. because for example you can bet in favor or against elon musk's predictions and that's his easy money i mean he's always well if you know elon it is yeah this is the problem if you're if you're a friend of elon you can make some money on this but there's so many people who are big fans of elon musk who thinks you know he recently predicted that uh robot surgeons will be better than human doctors within three years.

2:25:08Ant Pruitt:I would short Elon on almost everything he says. Everything possible. Nobody ever got rich betting on Elon. Well, that's not true. But that's not true. Elon, please keep your mouth away from my Celtics doing a back-to-back NBA championships. Thank you. Oh, we're rooting for you. In advance. Last story. I don't know if you've ever run into this. I've always wondered about it. I'll get to buy tickets to a concert. And it says, you must have our app on your phone and your ticket will appear on the app. But what if I don't have a smartphone? In the past, there's always been kind of an out. Well, you can go to the will call and we'll print the ticket for you.

2:25:52Ant Pruitt:Well, I just saw this ex post. This 81-year-old man, lifelong Dodgers fan, season pass holder for 50 years, just told by the Dodgers, we don't print tickets. And you got to get a cell phone. You got to. Oh, wow. He's not going to be able to go to the game. They should just give him a phone. And all it does is give him tickets. That's what they should. He says he can't use the phone. He doesn't know how to use the phone. All it does is tickets. And he can just give it to the dude and he'll do it. I agree. The first story, I said the same thing that Benny said. I would go get him an iPhone SE and then take all the other apps off except the phone app.

2:26:33I mean, the ticket app and just give it to him. and use it as a as like a PR you're talking about my mom with Alzheimer's I did that the last time

2:26:40Ant Pruitt:I visited a couple of months ago I'm sad to say I should be there right now but uh I took her iPad and I took everything all the apps off because she really can't use them and I put big icons in the front with the pictures of all the family and if she taps it it will FaceTime called that person hoping that that would make it so that she could just and it worked for a while but now she's gone far enough that she doesn't even, she can't even really do that. And honestly, the reason why they're doing this is not to be jerks. They're trying to get over fake tickets or, you know, people. Yeah, yeah.

2:27:12It's for security.

2:27:13Ant Pruitt:I understand. Yeah. People are selling other people tickets that when they get to the gate, doesn't work. You know what I mean? And tickets have always been super easy to fake anyway. It's a security thing. I get it. So it's kind of this weird catch 22. And again, people trying to cheat the system, ruin it even for this OG who kind of just wants to watch the Dodgers do his thing. They should know him at the stadium anyway and just let him in. That's another thing. Come on in. This uncle been sitting here for thousands of games. We know who he is. They put his picture on the thing. If this guy comes up and says he got a ticket, he got a ticket.

2:27:45Let him in.

2:27:46Ant Pruitt:I bring it up just to remind us all, because we're all geeks, and we all have phones. We all have the app. I'll put the app on there. That's fine. The QR code is fine. I can do that. I can use my watch to get in, whatever. But there are a lot of people who aren't. let's not forget them let's not leave them behind in this AI technology especially the things are moving out right now for sure there there are 100 uh many things that are leaving people behind they're in smaller subtler ways but they're some of just get you know using the internet these days having accounts whatever can be so complex yeah um two-factor you can't apply for work if you don't have an email address I mean there's just some basic fundamental things people should be able to do that they can't.

2:28:30You know what's funny, Mike? This is funny. I'm totally a nerd and I know how to do all of this stuff, but I recently purchased a Neo as a way to just beat up on it to try to get our users to not buy Neos to try to do live streaming because it's just, live streaming's a little bit stronger. And I was setting it up in my house. I was minding my business. I'm watching the game. I don't feel like coming back down to the office to get another computer. And even though I know the name and the password for the Apple ID that we use for the company demo machines, it's like you need to authorize this on another machine which means i got to come down open the pelican case set up my traveling mac minis right there's no other notebook right they're all traveling mac minis right there you got to set up a whole computer what if you don't have another apple device thank you like and and i crazy but on the opposite of course you must have many apple devices look on the opposite end of that what really makes me sad is when the financial institution tells you that their two-factor authentication method is sending an SMS message.

2:29:27No, no, no, no, no. Allow me to put it in something a little bit more Yubi-Key than that because this is where my money at. And they're like, oh no, we use SMS message, which is easily spoofed. So it's so weird. And Mike is 100 % right. Two-factor is glorious as it should be. It's not because we can't get a single good way or multiple good ways to do it. And same thing if you walk to a cash register and they have the Vodafone machine or a Verifone machine to tap your thing. Why is a tap spot in seven different places, even in the same store? Right? If you go to whatever your grocery store is, let's call it Safeway.

2:30:06But our number one, the tap spot is on the bottom. But our number seven, the tap spot somewhere else. Like where the frick is the industry thing? Why can't it be in one place? I'm like, Jesus Christ. Oh, what a world.

2:30:17Ant Pruitt:What a world. Well, I'm happy to say when we convene every Sunday, we get smart people on and try to explain it all. And that's what this show is. We can't fix nothing. It's all about. We can't fix it. We can only explain it. Mike Elgin, GastroNomad. What's your next GastroNomad adventure? Tuscany, actually. That's where you are. So you're getting ready. Two weeks. Yeah, yeah. And it's going to be spectacular. We do three in Italy nowadays. Nowadays, we do Venice, Prosecco Hills, Sicily, and now Tuscan. Is that the most popular destination? Which one? Sicily? Well, just Italy. Italy, I think so, because we do three.

2:30:57Ant Pruitt:I mean, we only do one in France. That's in Provence. I loved Oaxaca. We went on to Oaxaca a couple of years ago. Yeah. And Amir just sent me a lovely note saying, we want to get together. I don't know. I would love to do any of these. It would be so much fun. Gastronomad.net. I wouldn't mind Barcelona. Sicily. And it's our 10th anniversary. So for our 10th anniversary, we've added Chile and the Cotswolds. Oh, the Cotswolds. Cotswolds. How fun. That's right. That's right. In the UK. That's right. They're not known for their cheese, but not known for their gastronomy, really. Well, their gastronomy is like so many UK places has gotten just brilliant in the last few years.

2:31:42Ant Pruitt:Oh, good. Yeah. so it's because of all the indian food yeah well that's london that's london's probably the best place in the world for indian food no offense to india but uh no but you know we've talked about this on the show before and i i suspect that there are a lot of people like so what is this exactly so basically we just uh get six eight ten twelve people together in a usually an old farmhouse or some cool location and we just do fun surprising stuff all day that's food related yeah and it's not tourism that's the thing i love it it's not tourism it's a small group experience so it's not you know you're not cattle it's with people who know and love the region so it's like being with locals sometimes yeah but um you might eat cattle but you are it's focused on people so it's not like we go to this winery we go and spend time with a specific winemaker it's not just this restaurant we we hang out with a chef a bit uh it's very personal very it really drops you into the culture and it's just fun every single minute so anyway if anybody loves food and travel uh this is the thing to do the way to do it especially for places that a lot of people don't want to go because the language you know morocco we do morocco um places like that it's a great safe just super fun eating all day and you make great friends everything i'm right now i just see a message from charlie and brock two two guys i met on the oaxaca adventure we've been buddies ever since and we talk all the time so it's really people do it really neat uh absolutely experience yeah uh we should also mention machinesociety.ai which is your newsletter you do a ai podcast as well you're that's right that's right but you can if you if you subscribe to machine society.ai you'll get all the stuff that i do so if you're just on the podcast and all that stuff i really recommend machine society.ai because that's that's sort of like the hub of of of all my activities it's it's not just ai it's it's about every cyberpunk trope come real it's become like part of our everyday life such a world yeah absolutely so i'm trying to provide it's a it's a very human humanistic champion for humanity view of all this advanced technology.

2:34:06Ant Pruitt:And I'm not against the technology. I think the technology is great, but we need perspective more than - You know, I'm sorry we didn't talk about this story you just did about corporate sabotage doing something called black traffic, which is AI driven online disinformation. That's right. It's the techniques of state sponsored disinformation that's come to the business world. And it's where companies compete with these sort of AI-driven propaganda against their rivals. How do you fight that? To create mistrust. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it works in the global political sphere and it's unfortunately starting to work in the business world too.

2:34:49Ant Pruitt:Of course it is. Of course it is. All right, one more plug for you, Mike, because your son does this really or started this really great company called chatterbox hello chatterbox.com how's that going it's going great in fact you were you were uh showing off the rabbit and how it's sort of like using open claw chatterbox is not using open claw but it's using llm based ai now and to teach kids ai literacy kids about the future that they're going to be living in yeah and so you they build the kit themselves they program the kit it's all child friendly and highly secure it's the only um it's the only uh uh compliant uh smart speaker allowed in schools because it's so private and secure and so yeah i would think every school district would want to do this because this is what you need to learn today that's right that's you know there's reading writing arithmetic and ai that's right and it can be used as a tool for learning reading writing and arithmetic uh you once you've built it and programmed it it can help kids study but it won't hand them the answers it won't write for them it will teach them to be smarter instead of instead of dumbing them down with ai which is exactly how we want kids to to use ai right to to to learn better and faster and not just have it do their work for them hello chatterbox i like to give it a plug because it's such a great idea thank you really appreciate that thank you mike thank you doc rock thank you jason three of my favorite people it's fun to see you on a sunday i hope you have a wonderful week nice to see all of you too we do twit every sunday afternoon 2 to 5 p.m Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC.

2:36:38Ant Pruitt:You can watch it if you're a club member in our Club Twit Discord. I hope you're a club member. If you're not, please join. We'd love to have you. Twit.tv slash Club Twit. The only way to get ad-free versions of all our shows. And if you are a member, you can watch and chat with us in the Club Twit Discord. But everybody can watch when we're doing it live on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. after the fact we put it on the website at twit.tv there's audio and video there for all our shows we also uh have a youtube channel dedicated to the video great way to share clips probably the easiest thing to do subscribe and your favorite podcast client that way you'll get it automatically as soon as benito is done polishing it up or i guess kevin king works on the final edit thanks to benito gonzalez and kevin king our producers and editors appreciate it benito puts the show together does the technical directing thanks to all of you for watching thanks to mike and doc and jason we'll see you next time another twit is in the can this is amazing