TWiT 1089: Robot Butt Crack - Anthropic Banned, But Winning

34:49And excuse is the right word because that's not the only reason they're being fired, right? Yeah. Well, no, because people overhired in the lockdown period, but it's a good excuse, but it's about responsible use of it. And it's be regulated in some way i mean san francisco is a ai capital of the world needs ai as a an economic driver right now yeah house prices aren't going to lose value by themselves but no it's i can't

35:21Ant Pruitt:understand the pushback against big tech and ai i really can't um yeah because the whole thing has been mismanaged you know it's like ai has been hailed as this golden child which is going to lift us out and solve world cancer and the rest of it and it's not there yet it's not even close to being there yet, but it's being used as an excuse for all kinds of things. And I've got to say, a friend of mine is a teacher and she's really shocked by how young people are adopting this and just trusting it. They will feed their homework assignments into Claude and get complete garbage back and just submit it without checking.

35:58It needs to be used responsibly.

36:01Ant Pruitt:That's a kind of laziness, isn't it? Yeah. I think one of the real concerns, certainly in education of AI is, this is actually though the story of technology in many ways. I was thinking about this with my Oura Ring, is you start to rely on technology and you stop thinking for yourself. So with the Oura Ring, I decided to take it off because I was using it to gauge how good my sleep was every night. And then I realized the real source of truth in this is how I feel, not what my ring tells me. right yeah and by focusing on my ring i'm not thinking about how i feel same thing with education if you let claude do your writing for you it's so tempting just not to do any thinking at all and for most of us writing the reason you learn to write is it's a process of learning to think yes and you'll never learn to think and that's what worries me about it i mean that's not a good outcome i've seen i i we're already seeing in journalism for example when ChatGPT first came out I looked at it and I thought every publisher on the planet is going to be watching this and going, at last we can get rid of those pesky journalists and the amount of slop that's generated by there and not even you know, for example the largest local newspaper chain in the UK reached one of their journalists put out 110 articles in a single day by using AI and you're just like, this is insanity it really is well the good news is most people will read it through ai so there really is it's a there is a loop yeah talking to each other it's like the old siri alexa memes when we first got those you know like hey siri hey alexa yeah are you talking to each other yeah so you know i'm an ai fanatic i love ai i use it in every way but i think you're exactly right that we we ian we We need to think about how we're using it and use it responsibly.

38:00Ant Pruitt:Yeah. I do worry about the environmental impact of it too. That's another, that's it. You nailed, you nailed a couple of things. And here's, here's the, the two things I think about a lot. Cause I really do have these processes. Number one, I'm like you, I use AI a lot all the time. I absolutely love it. I'm having fun, trying things. I, you know, written a couple of apps that I'm playing around with, but I still do morning pages every morning because I learned that in college. Right. So I still got my book out. I do my three pages. I write by hand all the time But I also put on my headphones and I do my you know 7500 steps I'm walking the block and I'm having a conversation back and forth with Claude Right, and I have it synthesize all of those raw brain dumpy thoughts and it puts it into Like a set of notes where it tags everything reminds me of priorities because as ADHD person I can't have a straight line conversation.

38:50Ant Pruitt:I just don't it's really useful if you have ADHD 100 % so it's saving my bacon it's reminding me of things that I need to do like the other day it was like hey You know I have I know that you haven't talked about picking up your prescription in a little bit Are you do and I was like, oh yeah, it turns out I got four pills left. I might as well go get that done You know, so like it's it does helpful, but I still write every day with fountain pen in my book like, you know To process that muscle, but here's one thing that I think about when it comes to the environmental thing if we put a bunch of agents on their actual papers and less of the people feelings and have it help us develop better plans to try to do some things i think it could even help us fix some of the things that we're doing environmentally like i think that it can help us figure out um maybe what we can do with some of these crops that are you know overall better or for here it's we're losing a whole size of mountains because we have so much rain recently I mean we're talking 800 year old trees just dropping in the middle of Waikiki.

39:53Ant Pruitt:Oh, I know. And it's like what knowledge will we have? Should we change the grass around this tree in order to shore up the thing so it does get super wet? This grass absorbs a lot of water and then it will dry by the sun because we're sunny here every day and they don't have to worry about you know an 800 year old you know 4 ,000 pound tree dropping in the middle of Waikiki. But couldn't you ask a botanist that? I mean would AI give you a better answer? We have those botanists that tree still fell. sometimes i feel like you know like companies will invest in something right now because it's labeled as ai rather than yeah look at all birds which is now now smart bird smart bird it was a slipper company they decided that they're going to become an ai data center company they they and their stock went through the roof they're smart birds briefly yeah so yeah i mean that's a perfect example just label it with ai and everybody will be happy i mean the thing is we know how to do this stuff it's whether there's the will to do it and sticking ai in front of it might drive it forward but we know how how to deal with ecology up to a point uh it's just getting the political and social and financial will to actually get it done um i'm gonna take a break we have not answered that question definitively but i guess i will that be a lot to expect on it on a podcast we solved it today it's really it's matches i think everything's fine we're gonna this the next few weeks will be interested we'll be telling i wonder what's going to happen with fable i have a feeling this week we'll hear something um and i wonder how the american people are going to deal with this you know the threat of ai it's but i don't think there's an answer uh right now anyway it's unpredictable i wouldn't place a bet on polymarket if i were you at this point oh well somebody lost a million on polymarket when the world cup because they bet that spain would beat uh cape verde and it was a nil it was a zero zero score draw it was a tie so wow yeah and so yeah so that's severely out of pocket wow damn that's terrible hey hey you know what these companies uh these these casinos they don't get built by giving you money it doesn't work that way unless they're owned by the former by the president but yeah there are some people who can make a casino go bankrupt but that person has special thousand on the draw or yeah i wonder how much who put a thousand on the job put the money on the draw how much did they make and i have to go and double check that yeah go check that out i want to know we'll find out in a minute you're watching this week in tech with doc rock from honolulu owen thomas from san francisco he's the managing editor of the san francisco business business times and ian thomas who is where in thompson rather who is where you're in the east i'm in richmond california yes yes so richmond annex as they like to call themselves in a rather pretentious way we were driving by the chevron tanks down there and and uh apparently chevron's about to withdraw will that change uh they're shifting the headquarters but the refinery will always be there oh they'll always have the refinery well i mean i've i've just finished i've just become an accredited cert member a community response uh team member here and uh yeah getting my ham license next month congratulations and uh yeah that was one of the scenarios they brought up what if one of those tanks goes up and it was just like well we'll do we can but chances are most of the city's going to burn down yeah always interesting living in the shadow of a refinery somebody said that you almost said nil nil and that would have cost you your u.s citizenship he came so close didn't he he checked himself it's at zero zero our show today brought to you by shopify i love the shopify have you ever thought of starting your own business you know you have a great idea those are easy to come by but those pesky little details probably stopped you right how do you charge people who's going to design the website how oh here's a big one i know henry went through this with his salt hank how do you handle fulfillment i i've been there i've watched my own kids uh with their starting starting their own business but you know what they got it done and you know how they got it done with this shopify i love shopify shopify yes when you go to salt hank it's a shopify you see that shopify pay button shop pay button there it's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world from household names like heinz and mattel to brands just getting started like my boys you know salt hank's salt lovers club how about building the website i gotta tell you hank did not have the skills but shopify helped him build a beautiful online store and here's the thing it wasn't cookie cutter it matched his brand's unique style you can see it yourself it's beautiful and they can do that for you too shopify also helps with marketing you can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling and of course shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise and everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond.

45:08Ant Pruitt:And do not forget that iconic purple shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash twit. Go to shopify.com slash twit. Shopify.com slash twit. love that sound uh let's see we have we have not completely covered the ai thing but i think we've done a pretty good job of it you mentioned that open ai might be the beneficiary actually this interesting i saw a study that said actually anthropic may actually be helped by the ban that sales data suggests that uh because i guess people go wow it's that good that the government had to ban it it must be really good and as a result anthropic's existing models the opus models have been growing like topsy according to ramp anthropic's share of ai subscriptions paid for by businesses rose two and a half percentage points in may to 41 finally beating open ai which had 39.5 of ai subscriptions in may flat from the month so anthropic the winner in may uh now remember this ban happened just a couple of weeks ago but uh there's you know marketing experts say this may be a good thing a bad thing for anthropic i think it's winning the pr rule the pr war certainly every time they get banned they get more customers isn't that amazing yeah meanwhile people have heard about them you know every everyone's heard about chat gpt right exactly Anthropic has always been kind of, you know, like an inside Silicon Valley software engineers, you know, love cloud code kind of, you know, secret vibe.

47:12And, you know, OpenAI has been kind of the safe, recognized choice. And that's, you know, that's really changed. Meanwhile, Ed Citrin, who is it? Claude just sounds like your uncle. I mean, it's great. I mean, I like the name because it rolls off the tongue easier. Uncle Claude. But Claude just sounds like your uncle or your friend, which was on point, but when you're thinking of something that has like a tech name to it, right? We have all these something something metrics or something something Maddox or I this, or you know, whatever, Claude just, it sounds innocuous. It's a better name, I agree with you.

47:43It is a glorious name, but it doesn't help for spreading the meme-ifying of it, like turning it into a thing, right? Even Gemini is very futuristic. What do you think of Fable and Mythos? I mean, those are - No, those are better, like those are better. fable i don't know it goes back to aesop i don't know about that but mythos i admit those i can get with that's a good it sounds like uh you're gonna snap your fingers you know you got the

48:06Ant Pruitt:yeah infinity stones but it is that's what they should name it ai infinity stones yeah i am inevitable uh ed zitron who is a notable ai critic and has for a long time been saying ai is uh spending so fast they can't possibly keep it up got somehow got audited financial documents independently verified by the financial times of open ai's revenue and according to these documents they lost 38 and a half billion dollars last year and you have to be you have to be careful with those numbers because a lot of a lot like of the big chunk of that comes from their conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit.

48:53Oh, okay. It's complicated, but they had this very complex capped profit structure that allowed Microsoft and others to invest in them, even though they were a nonprofit. So, you know, those R &D expenses that you see, a lot of that is actually like revaluating those interests. That eventually gets swept away by the conversion to a for-profit. The other thing that you've got to keep in mind is their stock expense, which is, you know, it's not nothing, but it's a non-cash expense when they give stock options or other equity to employees.

49:35Ant Pruitt:This is why we have the business reporter on. Yeah, I mean, again, there's a lot of debate about it, but most Wall Street analysts, when they're analyzing public companies, they kind of wave their hands about stock-based compensation. Okay. And OpenAI did announce they now have a billion monthly active users, or is it weekly? I think weekly active users of ChatGPT. It's certainly achieved market share. And a couple of months ago, they made the largest raise of financing in history, valuing the company$852 billion. But Anthropic has just leapfrogged them with a higher valuation of almost a neat trillion dollars, which as a privately held company, unprecedented.

50:22Ant Pruitt:Both are public this year, right? Or will they? Open AI, what Sam Altman has said to employees is that they've filed confidentially to go public, which is kind of a preparatory step. And they could go public within the year. They might stay private longer, he said, just because AI technology development is so fluid and there might be some benefits to staying private longer. I'm a little skeptical of that. I'm not sure what those benefits are. rules about when you have to go public. There are rules about that, right? The Jobs Act weakened those rules, you know, or, you know, weakened those rules or gave companies more flexibility.

51:03You know, the old rules had to do with the number of shareholders, which was kind of a function in forcing Facebook to go public back in the day. I remember these days, it's much easier to stay private for a long time. And, And, you know, as you can see, there's plenty of capital available to these companies.

51:21Ant Pruitt:Yeah, as long as they can raise privately, it seems like it would be better to stay private. No, we just talked about SpaceX buying Cursor, though. And SpaceX is using that new public equity. That funny money. You know, you can call it funny money, but it's letting them do real deals. Well, and it's also a stock-based compensation is very valuable for getting the best engineering talent, right? If you have a public stock, it's a little easier to use that. Absolutely. Because essentially, you just keep issuing shares and diluting shareholders. Then you buy back shares if you have cash flow. Now, that's a problem for these companies.

51:59But as long as the valuation stays up, they don't have to worry about that. It's difficult to believe that share buybacks by companies were actually illegal until the 1980s and Reagan reformed the entire system. We could have solved a lot of problems.

52:15Ant Pruitt:Reform is doing a lot of work in that sense. I don't know if that's a reform. Well, no, I mean, Intel spent billions buying back its own shares to support the share price and let chip manufacturing technology just lie useless. And now they're paying the price for it. So I worry that other companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI are going to fall into the same trap. Well, you remember back then too, like you didn't have C. I mean CEO salary caps was kind of a thing You know, it wasn't this situation where a company who's losing money and yet their CEO is making more Right. Yeah, and so the guys that do it the way Apple do it or you know Steve and Tim did you know like I'm gonna pay a dollar, but I'm gonna make my money on whatever the stock makes Those guys all did really well, you know, they weren't as rich as or talked about as but their companies tend to do well because they have a vested interest in making sure everything's moved forward.

53:13Back when, I always want to call him Randy Steve, when Randy Steve was running AT &T, AT &T was like scrubbing knuckles, but this dude was making 48 million a year as a CEO, like really killing the blue ball. You mean Randall Stevenson?

53:28Ant Pruitt:Yeah, Randy Steve. Randy Steve. I was so mad at him back in the day, but until they got rid of him, like, yo, AT &T almost tanked. And he was making more, he was like one of the highest paid CEOs at that time. So a lot of stuff changed in 84, bro. Yeah. It's such a weird number, but I feel like our entire economy took a weird turn and we thought everything was gravy until somebody snatched it. Jeff Atwood says that 84 and all of those Reagan era rules changes were what really powered the income inequality explosion that we are seeing now. Yeah, I agree. Couldn't help either. Jeff Bezos is closer in net worth to you and me than he is to Elon Musk.

54:17Ant Pruitt:The second richest man in the world is closer in net worth to you and me than he is to Elon Musk. That's how much more Elon Musk is worth. Okay, I need Owen's brain for a second. Sorry. By the way, it is funny money, so you can say Elon's a trillion dollar man. That was going to be my question. Elon Musk has better divorce lawyers. Okay. Somebody. So that was not the question, Owen, but Leo was closer. If we had to put a real thing on it, like took a lot of the funny money out of it, what does it really mean? Like I tried to do it in my head the other day and I wasn't drunk enough. You know, I'm not sure this is a very satisfying answer, but if you take the funny money out of it, none of this happens, right?

55:05The speculative investment that is fueling AI, it just would not be possible without kind of our modern stock markets. And the willingness by investors to just believe in whatever Elon Musk or Sam Altman is selling them. it's so powered by belief and story and narrative and hope and FOMO you know it's like well you wouldn't have these kind of like wild inequitable outcomes but you wouldn't have the upside either so it's really hard to see any version of this that doesn't happen without kind of the the the modern miracle and modern curse of you know of public markets somebody somebody did

56:00Ant Pruitt:the calculations i wish i could remember but for every dollar loss in the spacex uh value uh stock market value elon loses something like 150 billion dollars there's a huge huge amount of swing and he has a compensation plan that's crazy though he's never going to see that compensation package because it requires a million people on Mars, among other things. Yes. Which honestly is never going to happen. Everybody knows it's not going to happen. I got into a huge argument. The one thing that blew my mind is when that story came out last week, I remember saying to a buddy of mine, hey, remember when we were making fun of Elon for losing like 44 billion on Twitter?

56:42I'm sorry, X. Nothing, nothing.

56:46Ant Pruitt:By the way, that was a good investment as it turned out. Turned out. Right? Not for the revenue of X, but for the power. Yeah, it was a power move. He didn't know at the time it was a power move. I really don't think he's that brilliant. It helped him elect his president, frankly. Which he did from his heart. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I'm really torn on Elon because I have so much respect for early Elon and what his goals were and what he did. And it's just later Elon that seems to be completely out of control. among other things, he now predicts that by 2030, SpaceX's revenue will be a trillion dollars a year.

57:32Yeah, the S1 was fascinating reading because he was like, well, we need to get a self-sustaining colony on Mars so we don't have all our eggs in one basket. Kind of annoyingly missing the fact that if you're born on Mars, you probably can't function on Earth because it's got one third of the gravity and you'd need an exoskeleton to actually walk around you know this is all pie in the sky stuff and it worked he got his funny money nasdaq changed their rules so that retail investors can well get ripped off in my opinion but you know it's one of those things um and we

58:07Ant Pruitt:honestly feel i i feel like that people who buy spacex stock are being sold a bill of goods that But it's just, it's a meme stock. Would Mars give us the best basketball players, though? Yes. The grosser call. They'd be very easily injured. That would be the only downside. They'd be great basketball players in Mars gravity. I'm glad you brought up Kelly and Zach's book, because that is a must-read for anyone interested in it. It's called A City on Mars. And it, I mean, I'll give you the TLDR. Can we settle space? Should we settle space if we really thought this through? No, no, and no. Basically, it is completely impracticable, and they list so many reasons why it's just not going to happen.

58:57Ant Pruitt:Now, I think we should send robots to Mars. I think we should send AI to Mars because it could survive the flight. Its eyeballs wouldn't explode. It wouldn't have to worry about cosmic rays if it were properly shielded and it wouldn't go crazy in the six-month flight. And there's a lot of reasons why going to Mars is not a good idea. And I have to think Elon knows that unless he's really high in his own supply. Matt Damon famously said, fortune favors the brave when he was doing an ad for FTX. That didn't go so well. That aged like milk. It was a wonderful interview. All the FTX commercials back in the day, it's super funny now.

59:43and I see the people that were on it and I'm like, oh my God, you guys. They all got sued, right?

59:47Ant Pruitt:Don Brady. I think the court said, no, they're not. It was just an ad. Come on, man. It was just an ad. Yeah. Andy Weir had a wonderful interview with Andy Weir about The Martian. And he said the one thing, okay, two things that we truly stood out. First off, the initial premise, the windstorm that blows away the aerial can't happen on Mars. But also the other thing was getting in and out of spacesuits. because if you try and do that on the ISS, it's a three-hour process, you know, and then he just slips into this thing, right, I'm going walkies now, you know. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I interviewed Andy, and he said there are only a couple of scientific inaccuracies in this book, and that storm on Mars was one of them.

1:00:30Ant Pruitt:However, OpenAI did make a big hiring move this week. Two years ago, Google paid, it is said,$2.7 billion to hire Noam Shazir, Nobel Prize winner. He was the architect of Google's Gemini models, wrote the original Transformer paper. $2.7 billion, along with his team of researchers for character AI, a big acqua hire. Two years later, he has now moved on. And he is going to open AI, which is considered a huge acquisition for open AI, a big win. And I think a big loss for Google. He wrote the famous paper, Attention is All You Need, that introduced the transformer architecture. And by the way, that's what GPT stands for, is general purpose transformer.

1:01:29So, you know, you have to think,

1:01:31Ant Pruitt:if he got$2.7 billion from Google two years ago, what the hell did OpenAI offer him?

1:01:40Ant Pruitt:First daughter's founded marriage, maybe? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, you could marry Sam Altman's daughter. I don't know. I believe all of Anthropx co-founders are still there, which is kind of their claim to fame. All of the other AI companies. I mean, OpenAI has won this round, but they've lost people to Apple, to Meta. XAI has been bleeding people. That's a big reason why they're buying Cursor is because basically they've lost a lot of their technical co-founders and they need to kind of restock the talent. and you know i i think we're going to see a lot more comings and goings especially as these companies go public and some of the early hires cash out um and you know others are attracted by the uh by the public equity payouts that that these companies can now kind of yeah going public is value is certainly uh i mean that's what we're saying that's one of the reasons why you you go public uh so that you can and a lot of these guys are taking their they're um they're taking their payouts and they're you know going elsewhere right like it's it's kind of a smart move especially if you live in the bay like i want to make sure that i you know finish paying off this house and do a couple other things you could move to lichtenstein you can completely move like i mean there's guys now who can cash out of this cursor move and like just step away from the game and they're squared away for quite a while you know don't i mean usually there are uh lock-ins for the founders and the people that get acquired, right?

1:03:21Ant Pruitt:Typically, I think three years. Yeah, you want to be the op manager where you can just take it. Yeah, you can leave us right away. You don't have to do anything. Take your stock and get out of here. See, I'm going to leak this. You're staying very quiet on this because a friend of mine is a co-founder of Anthropic and a former registered journalist. So I can't say anything about it, but yes, you're right. He's a happy man. I do wish, I wish, one thing I wish Anthropic would do better, and I wish more people understood the difference between HRF models and constitutional models. I think the reason why I went heavier on Claude than OpenAI, it's not just even the crazy stuff that goes on in OpenAI.

1:03:59I never even touched Grock. I'm mad that they took the name. I used to always say, oh, these people could Grock this better. This would be more sense. I'm glad that they stole one of my favorite words, which I stole from Christina Warren. She stole from, let's face it, Robert Heinlein. Yeah, from Robert, yeah. Yeah. Of course. But like, don't just take a good word and ruin it. Dang it. Anyway, I wish more people really did understand the way constitutional models work as opposed to, you know, sort of human reinforcement. And I think that would go a long way to help even just, you know, this over AI hate that's going down right now.

1:04:33A whole lot of it has to do with, you know, fear of losing jobs for... It's really weird. The thing that we use to elect certain people by telling them that other people are going to take your jobs. And then, well, that's not working on smart people because they know better. So let's just scare them into thinking that AI is going to take their jobs. And I'm like, yo, people will always need human connections. So there's certain jobs that are never going to be taken. You know, it's really weird.

1:05:00Ant Pruitt:Massage therapists. Yeah. How are you going to get called to fix this knot in your neck? Acupuncturists. I guess you could have robots do that. I don't know if I trust that. Plumbers? Plumbers? You're not going to have a robot. Plumbers. Yeah. Plumbers? Have you ever seen a robot's butt crack underneath your sink? No, and you don't want to. You don't want to. And on that note, we're going to take a break. Sorry. I think we have a show title, though. Thank you, Doc. Robot butt crack. Robot butt crack. I was going to call it Limpets and Barnacles, but now I've got robot butt crack. Robot butt crack sounds like a good band, dude.

1:05:37Ant Pruitt:it would be would it be a punk band or would it be uh heavy metal what kind of i think we got to do 80s yacht rock bro yeah it's so opposite of what it actually is right we get some chris christopherson robot butt crack take me away to my robot but crack no that that's not gonna work that's doc rock he is the director of strategic partnerships at ecamm which by the way we are using right now and we love. Thank you, Doc Rock. We appreciate that. And of course, you'll find him on YouTube and apparently a fan of the Japanese national team. Is that who you're rooting for in the World Cup? Actually, no.

1:06:14About 100 % money is on Holland as it always is. They sure looked good yesterday. They're way too good to not win yet. I mean, like the game played as it is played. Is that why you put an orange muff

1:06:25Ant Pruitt:on your normally purple microphone? Oh, dude, I'm normally, Holland is my squad through and through. My first fell in love with the game from watching i didn't know at the time johan kruijf and pele play at rfk stadium when he had the diplomats versus the cosmos and i had no idea what i was watching at the time but as i got older and i realized i saw history bro i saw johan kruijf and pele play each other oh wow i've been in love with dutch national team ever since then that was like back when there was eight in front of the years so yeah wow and some of the best fans in the business as well they really enjoyed themselves Well, the Scots give them a run for their money.

1:07:00No, no, the Scots definitely give them a run for their money. But with Formula One...

1:07:03Ant Pruitt:The color of insanity. Oh, yeah, the Max Verstappen fans are very much... No, no, I mean, a friend of mine went to the last Dutch Grand Prix, and he said, seriously, if you get the chance, go there, camp out. The parties are absolutely epic. That's the one that's right on the ocean, right? It's a sand dune. I got deaf threads for teasing Max Verstappen on threads, bro. The Maxis came after me, bro. and like oh they're like but you're american you can't know anything about f1 i'm like and you're five so go away i know you are but what am i that's ian thomas who uh thompson i keep calling you in thomas i don't know why maybe because of the english muffins i think but i don't know it's my fault he's my favorite english muffin you're owen thomas managing anywhere in san francisco business time business times he's ian thompson i don't know why we do this we put you together all the time it's just i think benito does it to confuse me anyway i don't know it's quite an honor so so so tell your friend at anthropic i love claude i was very upset when fable got turned off i was right in the middle of a session and all of a sudden said you can't use this model anymore and i thought it was my credit card i thought oh gosh darn it i was rewriting the whole twit ad sales system oh no i mean honestly claude for software is pretty is pretty good i'm a fan of that when i have an issue i go to claude i go i go to claude code yep yeah that's good they do a good job uh good to have all three of you here this episode today brought to you by simply cx what separates the tech companies winning right now from the ones falling behind it's not just the product it's the experience and you already know that gap is only getting wider.

1:08:52Ant Pruitt:That's exactly what the Simply CX podcast was built to explore. Launched by Microsoft and hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experience leader, Simply CX brings you real no-fluff conversations with leaders from companies like CarMax, TD Bank, and T-Mobile on how AI, data, and design are reshaping what customers expect and demand. If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode with Neil Iverson from T-Tech Digital about how AI tools like context gathering and call summarization are changing the way customer support teams operate behind the scenes. You'll appreciate how Simply CX goes beyond the headlines and gets into how AI is actually being implemented inside large organizations today and what's realistically working.

1:09:41Ant Pruitt:For example, an airline contact center transformation was able to reduce average handle time by 30 % while improving the experience for both agents and travelers, which is timely given this summer travel season, right? New episodes drop every other Tuesday. Find Simply CX wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to tell them I sent you. Simply CX. Customer experience. It's all about the customer experience. uh and uh incidentally uh it is the first day besides being the first day of summer the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere it is also father's day at least in the united states i don't think are you a father doc rock i don't remember no no we've got no fathers except me on here today yeah i like i like expensive things and traveling you know what you're smart uh i love my kids it was fun uh henry called me uh this morning and then abby called in the middle of the call so i conference them in and i got to talk to both kids at the same time and it felt really good but now they're yours can now take care of you if he keeps slinging well that's right they're now in their 30s they're full-grown adults and so they're not really my kids anymore they've gone out into the world they're always you know what's funny about that story uh leo is that you in the old days right uh salt was all about money right where we get salary and all that yeah that's right yo hang just took it full circle it's like you know kids are into bringing stuff back into the analog phase now there's this like whole thing about vinyl and analog cameras and retro games he's like y 'all gonna make salt money again he makes he cooks it's interesting because he's done very well in fact it's a couple i was gonna ask has he done an an out burger yes because i i get craving no i went i went for i went for one yesterday but i'd be curious to see if he's done an in and out you know what his latest uh thing i hope i'm not giving something away because he hasn't released it yet but he's trying to learn to make what is that amazing japanese omelet that's just perfect oh dude i could do that i can show him how to do it he's trying to he's so he's shooting so every morning he's making omarais and he's recording the efforts as he gets better and better yeah and then he hopes you'll have at the end here's you know how i learned how to do omorais yeah so that's what you can do it really actually the shape of the pan right regular american style pans will work as dorky yeah you need a square one right yeah no go on amazon and buy him the one from motokichi um who's the guy who's made it famous you know the the the sort of clown looking dude with the red hat you can buy motokichi special pot if you can't find it i'll find you a link M-O-L-T-O-K?

1:12:25M-O-T-O-K-I-T-C-H-I, Motokichi. And it's the shape of the frying pan. If you use like an eight-inch normal chef omelet pan, it won't work. It has a little extra roundness to it. But getting that flip over perfectly is the thing. And it has to have that right structure inside. He's probably in a better position because you want to use farm fresh eggs. Like store-bought eggs are just trash nowadays. I can't find it on Amazon.

1:12:52Ant Pruitt:Oh, maybe it's this. I'll find you. It's a square pan. It doesn't say Motokichi. No, you don't want the square. The square pans is for making tamagoyaki. That's a little bit different. I love... But come on, you're in Patsaluma, Leo. You must have access to good eggs, surely. Oh, yeah, but unfortunately, Henry's in Manhattan. I don't know what the egg situation... Yeah, he got to get the upstate joint. Yeah, he has to come home to make his... Motokichi, Tamayaki, Omosaki, Kakasaki, Wakki. What is it called? Omokichi? Oh. Motokichi, he's this famous guy. His place is in Kyoto. And if you try to go to his restaurant, like you have to book almost like eight months in advance.

1:13:35And we were in Kyoto a couple of Christmas ago and I just happened to be walking down the alleyway and I look in the window and it was right by his restaurant and he just popped in the window. He's like, you know. Come on in, Doc Rock. No, we couldn't get in. you can't get it i've been trying i go to kilter every christmas i've been trying to get in still can't get it like but it's it's kind of incredible but there's lots of good omelette you don't have

1:13:54Ant Pruitt:to go to that one oh here it is from kyoto japan the ultimate omelet pan it looks just like a regular omelet pan yes the guy it does yes yeah it looks like it's just a round omelet slightly rounded at the bottom and you want to find that if you can get your hands on one of those that'll help you this is an indiegogo and look they raised 2.2 million yen which sounds like a lot of money It's not. It's not. There he is. He's so cute. Kichi Kichi. Yeah, he's a nice dude. I watch his videos. His videos are absolutely hilarious. He's adorable. He's a redhead. Yeah. Wow. He's like Ronald McDonald in Japan.

1:14:31Ant Pruitt:I am going to send this right now to Henry and say, this is what you need. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it wasn't about money for him, although it's turned out to be he's done very well. He said the other couple months ago, he said, I'm richer than you, dad. I said, that's how it's supposed to work out. That's the goal in life. So happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there. If you did a good job, your kids are doing better than you did. That's the whole idea. If you can't find it before December, let me know. I'll bring you one back. Oh. I go every December. Got to get away from this place. Christmas in Osaka.

1:15:06Yeah, actually, this time I'll do Kobe and Kyoto. But Kyoto and Osaka are like this. Now, Christmas in Japan, do you do the Kentucky Fried Chicken thing? because apparently that's huge over there. Abso-freaking-lully. And does it taste way better than ours? Abso-freaking-lully. Oh, my God.

1:15:21Ant Pruitt:You're the one who taught me that you take a leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick and you put that in your rice cooker. Yes. With the rice, of course. It's so good. And it makes it, I have to, now I have to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken to get one, though. Can I use Popeye's instead? I'd use any fried chicken from anywhere. Any fried chicken. Whatever fried chicken that you get left over, even if it's the one from like, what do you call it? The market? safeway even the one from say even the safeway one yeah oh all right you just take leftover pieces of chickens and then even nuggets i do like can i go to wait if i if i get rick ross aka wing stop i'll put like four or five of those nuggets with the rice game over you have learned so much on this show boys and girls i'm glad you uh aren't you glad you tuned in doc's cooking doc's cooking uh google speaking of google uh you win some you lose some in this case uh they lost they They fought, though, and I'm proud of them.

1:16:16Ant Pruitt:After the Republican National Committee and Democratic Party headquarters, they found, remember, they found pipe bombs planted there after the Capitol riot. And in the investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice, this is in 2023 in the Biden administration, went to google with a search warrant asking for this was just unsealed just now asking for all the people who had searched for things like pipe bombs um uh political you know things that kind of thing they wanted which would have been hundreds of search results uh i guess they were it's called a reverse warrant. Yeah. Or there's another one called a geofence warrant, which is right now in front of the US Supreme Court.

1:17:14Ant Pruitt:There's a constitutional challenge against this. Google announced that in 2023, it would no longer have access to users' locations history, so they couldn't comply with geofence warrants. I don't know. Is that true? Anyway, Google tried to fight this. They went to court because they consider this an invasion of their users privacy so i want to give them some credit for fighting this keyword-based warrants are a new area of u.s law and the courts ruled against google the courts said no you've got to give the department of justice that information google received geofence and keyword-based warrants in the pipe bomb investigation according to the records just now unsealed it produced data about users in the vicinity of the democratic national committee and republican national committee buildings in washington the company also was forced to comply with a warrant for users who searched for locations of the headquarters or the committee names paired with the words like security camera bomb and explosive the data was anonymized however so google didn't reveal names or other personal information by the summer of 2021 the company complied with the government's initial request to identify more than 250 users whose searches included references to bombs or if users repeatedly looked up the rnc or dnc two years later the government went back to google with a warrant to identify more than 300 users who did a single search about either committee so they they complied google complied at first this is all from bloomberg but when it when it came down to we want everybody who did this one search google protested that now you've gone too far the potential harm google lawyers argued the potential the individual harm to potentially thousands of individuals innocent users wrought by the government's invasion into their anonymous political activities and associations renders the search unreasonable and i have to say that sounds right yeah government lawyers counter that google couldn't vicariously assert the rights of its users against unconstitutional searches.

1:19:26Well, I mean, this really brought up to mind the...

1:19:28Ant Pruitt:Users don't even know about it. How can they protest? Go ahead, Ian. This kind of brought to mind, do you remember the Apple case in 2016 where the terrorists... The San Bernardino case. Yeah, the San Bernardino case. And Apple was there, you know, were told by the government, give us a backdoor to your operating system. And they said, no, Google was perfectly right to fight this, in my opinion. and it's a drastic overreach and very, very bad for privacy. Yeah. It's also dumb not to realize that, first of all, the amount of data you'd have to comb through, because when somebody hears something, people go and search it.

1:20:04That doesn't mean you're into it, right?

1:20:06Ant Pruitt:Well, that's the issue. Is this, I mean, this seems so unreasonable. You're right. And so once you open that door. 99 % of those searches are innocent. In fact, all but one. And then once you open that door you can easily chain a whole bunch of stuff together Right like if you had a thing where you know one of your friends was visiting your house And you know she's female or whatever but she brings a bunch of other friends with her and you're like, okay I'm just finishing up in the bathroom I'll be out in a second entertain yourselves and you come out of the freaking bathroom hair is wet You're like doing one of these at least a walked in nine times out of ten you knocked out dog You didn't even do nothing, but you're done i see it so like that's the kind of thing that's dumb about this is you can't just say oh somebody searched it so they must be in on it too like that that's just crazy so so and by the way uh i'll give credit to zoe tillman who is the law reporter for a bloomberg on this story so google did comply initially but that final broad warrant uh went too far in 2023 google fought it uh it sat in limbo for a year in 2024 a federal magistrate denied google's request google then challenged it they said they appealed it to the u.s district chief judge james bosberg whose name you may remember he's been very active lately in a number of high tech high profile cases in february 2025 he concluded the magistrate got it right and ordered the data from google by the way they did make an arrest i don't know but unfortunately we don't know if the uh arrest was if the evidence was based on what they found from google um that's not revealed in the arrest it just seems like an enormous lose though from a an investigative position because if you have to go through 300 400 people who actually search for these terms you know you might get the actual perpetrator but you're going to have to spend a hell of a long time going through useless information yeah it's a lot of fish in that net i mean that's that's where ai comes in right ai makes you know diving through all this information linking things up much easier in theory at least yeah and i imagine that uh well i don't know but i think one of the things you could say they maybe would take that data okay now we have 300 people and cross-reference it against other information that they had that might have had 10 suspects.

1:22:34Ant Pruitt:And then if they get a match there, now they're narrowing it down instead of just going through all 300 and saying, well, let's interview each of them. And it could increase these kind of maximalist demands for data because now if it is plausible that they can process it, they can persuade a judge perhaps that, hey, this data would actually have benefit. So now our freedom is based on chat GPT. We're all screwed. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Well, nowadays, if the person is smart, like I'm not giving you any instructions, criminals, but if you're using something like perplexity or, you know, even the search built into your various chatbots, that's not your search.

1:23:17That search goes from a couple of servers. I don't think you would even be able to spin it back.

1:23:20Ant Pruitt:Yeah, although, and this is something we've been talking a lot about lately, it's become more and more obvious to me that all of the AI companies, including perplexity, keep logs of everything that happened. Ah, there you go. And in fact, are collecting huge amounts of information because not only are they collecting your name and your search, but they're correlating it to other things. Let's say you give perplexity your tax return to say, did I calculate this right? They have a lot of information and all the evidence is that they're saving it. I had to... Except Anthropic, 30 days. No, that's only for Fable if...

1:23:57Ant Pruitt:I can't remember. That was another fascinating. People were very upset about that. But yeah, when you use these chatbots, in fact, I think it's when you use AI in general, they collect a huge amount of information, all the information you feed them. When you use the internet in general, Leo. Thank you. I was going to say web trackers. I told my friends this a long time. The difference is, so if I'm doing a Google search, I type in a search result, so they now have your IP address and your search result. If you're using AI, a lot of times, you're prompting it and sending it documents and sending it other information.

1:24:28Ant Pruitt:you're giving it much more than just a search term. Okay, but here's what Benny means, right? I'm looking at the Daily News. Do we call you Benny Benito? Is that allowed? It's my old Filipino thing. I think Benny probably doesn't mind, but I'm not going to. Don't worry, Benito. I won't call you Benny. Looking at this, with Bad Bunny in play as the number one dude on the planet right now, it's a good name. It's a nice match. I'm looking at the LA Times on Brave right now. It says 43 trackers on this site alone, Just reading this article right at point and that's just done on a regular newspaper today Something crazy innocuous, but I want you to try this kiss in case me anybody who's using brave I went to CVS comm right and I went to go order some Vaseline lip do hickeys right the plane suckers like this when I went to go type it in Because brave blocks something on her site all the day was going to a reload loop and it would not stop You can't click anything so that goes to tell you how much information why I use Brave and Ghostory and things like that, it goes to show you how much information we put out there every day.

1:25:35And so all of these guys in the chat, they know we're all nerds. But when people are like, I'm worried about my privacy. And I'm like, Ben, what do you use to block things on the web? I just use Microsoft Edge. Or I just use Google Chrome. It's not clear that you can do this

1:25:48Ant Pruitt:from the AI chatbots, though, right? Those are not, you know, you're not. Well, this is why I use Tool. you know I mean it's tour and DuckDuckGo yeah the way forward yep there is an excellent um EFF has an excellent page called cover your tracks where you can put your browser uh through a little um check to see if your browser fingerprinting see it used to be cookies that's so old school they don't use cookies anymore now they use as you said a doc they use a variety of information that they get from your browser printers is the money things like your screen resolution what extensions you've you've installed and stuff and uh so i just did this in my zen browser and yes it's blocking ads yes it's blocking trackers but look at this is it protecting me from fingerprint no your browser has a unique fingerprint that's not good that means any site that that does fingerprinting knows it's me exactly knows exactly who this is and one of the bigger things that nobody really talks about, let's just say all four of us are just super, super good, right?

1:26:58We keep everything down. We got it all tight. No problems there. But one of our friends in the friend group is loose with their stuff. All of our information is on their computer. Right? And so remember when us Mac users always had the one PC friend and you would get the thing from there using outlook.com and you would get these weird spams and you know, it's not from them, but it's their address, but they don't even speak in the right way that that person speaks. Like there's no New England accent in this email. And it's because their mail was sending mail to everybody. And, you know, it was normally dumb PowerPoint slides, but that was the beginning of getting your name onto these lists that, you know, I'm using incognito to try to get rid of.

1:27:38Ant Pruitt:We got phished. You got phished back in January because a client that we've done regular business this with got hacked and they sent an email to us from his address the kind of email he always sends asking for a request for a proposal and it looked i mean for it was it was the same email we get from this guy all the time right uh because the people once they hacked him looked at his emails looked who they sent them to and made it look the same and it had a link that you click to a document on Google Drive. And fortunately, here in the house, I have some filtering going on. So when we clicked it here, it just spun, right?

1:28:20Ant Pruitt:Right. Unfortunately, we sent it to an employee who does not have the same protections, it didn't spin, it popped up what looked like a Google login, which the employee then went through and filled out including the two factor authentication. The he was a man in the middle, the guy in the middle, got all of that, passed it on to Google so that the interaction continued apparently normally, but kept it and immediately used it to log into our Google workspace. The funny thing is it must work so well. They apparently got so much success with this. They didn't bother using their access for a few months.

1:29:00Ant Pruitt:They looked at a couple of emails and then wandered off. And Google finally noticed it three months later, 121 days after this phishing attack. good grief we got a notice from google that your workspace has been compromised but uh but you know we all the forensics tell us that nothing happened because i think they probably have a stack of thousands they're just working their way through them and we were you know they didn't get around to us so we were very lucky but that's exactly why this privacy is so important uh yes you know it's just uh it's an issue it's getting worse and i understand why to be honest the trump administration would be scared of fable because you put a tool like that in the hands of these bad actors god knows what could happen but it's funny the people who say that stuff the most when you check them on it for real for real they're the most lax about the security on other things that they don't realize that they give up on a regular basis they use a signal client that's not really signal that records everything yeah to the hard drive yeah it's easily hacked it's so easy nobody would do that i hate the term virtue signal is so overly played but it is in a way easy to virtue signal that you're trying to do all these things and it's like but no but you're well that's why i admit that's why i am admitting now to us getting phished right yes i think it's important to hear people say no no this happens and it happens to people who are very careful who have a lot of security and it still happens and it I want to say somebody in the chat brought this up a while ago, but it's funny because it makes sense.

1:30:38We get so much information now about the administration and their AI stance, right? What does dude post on his social platform basically every day? Weird AI pictures of him being a doctor or riding a horse. Oh, yeah, I was a doctor. That's it. And I'm like, bro. It was a doctor to photograph.

1:30:58Ant Pruitt:Oh, yeah, I'm a doctor. That's it. I'm like, listen, again, listen to you. like we want to be the anti-ai you know it needs to slow down you know they're crushing us and then yeah dude is out here posting ai crap on a daily basis you know where i means of former former uh opponents doing weird stuff you know where i bet uh sales of vpn uh is going through the roof right now in the united kingdom oh yeah okay okay i'm i'm looking at you i'm getting ready for a on this one because this is such a stupidity. So Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the UK, has announced last week that... For the moment.

1:31:38Ant Pruitt:Yeah, well, he may not be Prime Minister tomorrow and the Pali market betting is apparently that he will resign tomorrow. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's had to come. He is a personality vacuum. He's done very little despite being given a huge majority. So it's looking likely that he's going to go. Well, one of the things he did this past week has announced that at the end by the end of the year the uk will prohibit under 16s from using youtube facebook snapchat tick tock they still can use whatsapp uh and facebook messenger but they're banned and how are they going to enforce this this is the problem well that's interesting the the only way to enforce it would be to require everyone using those services adult or not to actually log in and provide a government-issued ID in order to use social media, which is a privacy nightmare.

1:32:33They're not going to stop kids from using this stuff. It's one of those ridiculous... I mean, Australia's gone down the same route. That's, by the way, what everybody's saying.

1:32:43Ant Pruitt:It worked so well in Australia that we're going to do it. But it doesn't work in Australia. I've got friends down there, and their kids are still using social media platforms. I remember VPN sales went through the roof in Australia when they implemented that last December. Yeah, and the same will happen in the UK as it did when they were talking about a porn ban. And honestly, I'm iffy about the utility of VPNs because basically you're just handing your traffic to a single company rather than a bunch of them. But this is totally unenforceable. Yes, it would be wonderful if teenagers weren't on social media because I think it's very bad for their mental health.

1:33:22Ant Pruitt:But at the same time, just saying... It's bad for grown-up mental health, too, I should... Well, true, true. It's bad for all of our mental health, let's face it. And it's highly addictive, by the way. I went to see a Bob Dylan concert last Saturday at the... Oh, you went to the Greek theater? I did. Oh, nice. How was it? Well, it was interesting. Look, I'm a Bob Dylan fan. Last time I saw him was 50 years ago in 1976, when I was 19 years old. so I thought it was really cool to see him 50 years later. I don't know. I haven't aged at all, but he has quite a bit. He's 85, and he kind of sat in the back of the stage behind a piano.

1:34:02Ant Pruitt:I mean, it's wonderful to hear him. His voice is still there, and his songwriting is still there. One of the best storytellers in the game. Yeah, no one expresses the meaning of his lyrics like he does. It's just brilliant. However... I'm glad his voice is still going, because we're going to see you order, and their voices do not carry well after. Well, he never had a great voice, so maybe that's why, right? He just helps. He still sounds like this. He sounded like he was 85 when he was 20, so maybe that's why he doesn't sound any worse. But no, I was thrilled to see him. But I think it was at his behest, because it is not the normal policy of the Greek theater.

1:34:39Ant Pruitt:There are signs everywhere that says, do not take your phone out of your pocket. If you use your phone, you will be ejected. And at the beginning, I loved this. It said, I think this is a Bob Dylan thing. We would like you to be present for this concert, not looking through this concert through a screen and not forcing people behind you to look through your screen. So we're asking that you not use your phones at all this concert. Now, I know there's some comics, Dave Chappelle will make you give up your phone at the door. So they didn't do that, but they were strict. But here's the interesting thing.

1:35:13Ant Pruitt:It really frosted the audience. and people were sneaking their phones like crazy. They could, especially, there were three acts. So in between, and it was for all three acts. It was the whole show. In between acts, people are going like this. People cannot go an hour without looking at their phone. I have to say, I can understand that. I was publicly shamed by Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields when we went to his last concert, because I was just, just as he was starting off, I just tweeted a picture of him. And he stopped and went, there's someone in the front row using their phone it was just like oh shit that's me right is he looking at twitter and he had somebody backstage watching no no it's just the light on your face yeah you could see the light on your face well good for him it's like i you know i have to say after the fact i thought you know what that's right let's be present for this and not experiencing it through you know creating fomo and our friends and things and how many times you go to a concert this guy's singing his heart out on the stage and people are turning around with their back to the guy taking a selfie to show that they were at the concert i would be so incensed if i were if you want to show me that you went to a concert do me a favor and just take a picture of your tickets after not before yeah don't not before because they can steal that's it like that should be the thing we should start because i also don't like it when someone's sitting there like recording the whole thing um because you know sometimes yeah what are you who's gonna watch that video well first of all yeah watch it it's not the whole thing but the hard part is like i want to know like what songs they're going to sing right i want to know that they bring out their good ones or you know what what special ones we forgot about that they pulled out or whatever and so when you're you're kind of giving it away right like you're kind of giving away i wonder what the set's going to look like because i'm in i'm in lighting and sound like i want to know how they rigged up the flyers the whole nine yards like let me see that when i get there don't spoil christmas it's why i don't like iphone leakers i missed i literally we had this conversation a thousand times i miss the days of waking up on announcement day and being ooh now we're just looking for that one thing that leaks haven't already leaked you know and nobody comes back and says we got it wrong they go oh well we're disappointed because they didn't play this or we're disappointed absolutely although they i miss the dylan website publishes the set list each time Did he stick to it, though?

1:37:33I mean, at that age, it might be hard to stick to it. No, no, he changes.

1:37:37Ant Pruitt:It is really annoying. I think it's also to warn people he's not going to sing the hits. This is not a Bob Dylan cover band. It's Bob Dylan. Yeah. Right? But I mean, I'm with you, Doc, on this, because we went to see Orbital at the Warfield, and there was one bloke in the very front row who recorded the entire concert on an iPad, of all things, and didn't dance at all. and you're kind of like, what the hell are you thinking? I see that a lot at the local shows where there are people dancing because we go to shows with, you know, mosh pits so you can really enjoy yourself. But there's always in the front two or three guys who don't really look like they're enjoying it, just recording it.

1:38:17Ant Pruitt:Like, that's what they do. It's like, dude, get out of here. Go away. Absolutely. Anyway, back to the UK. Back to the UK. hey I I think that I think kids can probably do without social media my question is what about YouTube YouTube is such an instructional I think that's a huge problem and YouTube is not really a social media to be honest it quasi right you know there's commenting there's you know I think it's horrible to ban YouTube horrible oh yeah I mean it's not a social gold mine it's like banning TV well we decided and you know what they could have back in my day everybody agreed newton minnow the chairman of the fcc testified to congress that television is a vast wasteland and and they tried to ban it remember mr rogers best name by the way for a person mr rogers in fact go see it it's on youtube you ever hear that uh testified in congress and saved pbs by talking about how important it was for the kids who watched mr rogers neighborhood and other shows how important that was he saved public television and so i could easily see that same mentality showing up here well you know it's bad something we didn't have as a kid so they don't need it anyway why are these changes being made the uk government says well that's what you want nine out of ten parents backed a social media ban for under 16s two-thirds of young people agreed what's changing it the wrong way around though i mean honestly if you're going to try and cut this cut this off first off don't allow kids to use their phone at school that's the absolute great starting point yep um and i agree with that one yeah yeah but in terms of in terms of the security aspect of this if you've actually got a login using a government registered um id that's going to make a security gold mine for somebody who wants to break into the companies that are running these things um it's incredibly harmful and it just won't work all kids will do is use burner phones and probably steal their parents driver's licenses and and you know go on that and it's just who would just let it happen anyway so yeah yeah explain this to me uh god they say to explain kids the answer is 42 leo they say it says so here in this section this is the uk's the government's own website fact sheet new rules to protect children online who will it affect children and young people under 16 crucially they will still be able to access the online world safely for learning news games and staying in touch with known friends and family on messaging services are they asserting that the messaging services are all you i don't understand what how what are they talking about this is the problem when you get government writing technology technology technology law because they don't understand they used ai to write this before we got social media right the number one thing you saw on tv about tech and chris hansen famously was creepers talking kids on AOL and prodigy and CompuServe chat bots well Chris wasn't that far back but the very first bad thing I ever heard about you know when tech is coming to get you was stranger danger through people anonymously talking to people on BBS's yeah well that in the film war games yes yes like oh my god like come on people they can they can talk to people on messenger that that's never worked and and this recently one of our um uh whole police officers but was acting as a like a 14 year old boy and busted some high monkey mucks over here you know from chatting so what here's here's here's more will adults need to prove their age many adults won't need to do checks because they've already got an account that has been open for more than 16 years.

1:42:29Or has a credit card connected to it?

1:42:34Ant Pruitt:I get can kids under 16 not get credit cards? No. But you could be your parents credit card could be connected to your account. Oh, yeah. Somebody's wallet is going to get finished. And they can just they can do it that way. Or it could it's linked to an email address that's age verified in other ways. I don't even know what that means uh honestly that one baffled me too because i don't know that many email accounts which require age verification i've never seen one some adults will already have done age verification under the existing online safety act so wouldn't need to do it again and if not well it could be as simple as a facial recognition check for over 18s in 27 is that why we have the new age verification here now because when i installed 27 it gave me some speech about I didn't read it, of course, because I'm old.

1:43:20But yeah, so Apple has changed this. Actually, let's take a break.

1:43:24Ant Pruitt:And I do want to talk about this because Meta is lobbying Congress. They're actually supporting the new COSA bill. But one of the things they like about it is that they wouldn't be responsible for age checks. Apple would or Google would. The gatekeepers, the app stores would be. and apple is actually i think trying to set that up now to get ahead of regulation but let's take a break and then we can talk about that i'd like to talk about that uh you're watching this week in tech with ian thomas from the lovely god dang it i blame you benito call him emma thompson let's ian owen please and doc ian thompson who uh by the way does a wonderful newsletter and it used to be called letter from america until alistair uh uh clark uh yes we we were alistair cook we were cook that's it we got we got slight it's now called view from the valley but um yeah i like that dude i like alistair cook just the name hi yeah he used to do so he used to this wonderful letter from america and you called letter from america and honored to honor him no i did honor him completely but um yes it was if you go to techfinitive.com you can subscribe to ian's wonderful newsletter uh view from the valley the shot shortly to become a podcast oh oh you're gonna do a show yeah i'm gonna i'm i'm trying to start a podcast but i've got to say some of the software out there is a real bugger to learn.

1:45:02Ian, listen, family, we're about to fight, bro. I can fix you. There's a software, it's called Ecamm. Turns out Twit Network was a really nice podcast network. You could do the whole thing by yourself. But he doesn't want to do video. Don't have to do video.

1:45:16Ant Pruitt:Oh, Ecamm will let you see. That's confusing about the name then. Yeah, that's why we took Live out. We took Live out. But it doesn't require a camera. No, no, no. And I would tell you to record it with the video on and just strip the video because it is something easier about doing it when you can see when you go to edit when you go to edit it right to see when you edit and then at the end you just output the audio only and send it you don't have to do video but just yeah send me an email oh ecamm with two m's right okay yes and i if you want i'll invite you i just got uh into something that's brand new called rebel audio i don't know if any of you've heard of this but this is a highly AI driven podcast network.

1:45:55Ant Pruitt:You still do the audio show, but it, but AI then can do all the other stuff, which is kind of cool. I was going to say, I really don't want to do video because I've got a face for radio. So I think, yeah, I don't tell you why you want to do video right now. I'm sorry to sidetrack you real quick. The numbers on YouTube for video watching on television is actually astronomical. And now really, YouTube has surpassed Apple and Spotify combined as a distribution network. So... Interesting. With over... Last year reported over a billion hours of podcast alone on television. Okay. So, Ian, your audience looks like us, right?

1:46:35You know, well, me, I'm the youngest at 60. But your audience looks like us. And what happens is what we do is we put... Like, I put Leo on MacBreak Weekly. I put it on in the living room. It's on the 65 Sony. You're still just listening. Yeah. But I'm just listening. But I'm walking around and if it just so happens that Andy says hey buy one of this I'll come into the living room and I see these numbers like this. Yeah And did I you know what I'm doing so I'm working a 3d printer. I'm doing something else But those numbers from YouTube What's right? It's true astronomical and you being a researcher that you are Go look those up before you say not to do video because doing what you're doing right now sitting in front of your your books just sitting there talking.

1:47:19It's easy. You already have everything. You don't even have to look at the camera. It could just be the side of your face and you're still talking. But what you don't want to do is put your podcast on YouTube with just a picture. That doesn't work. People don't like that. Okay. And people want to interact with the person because, again, we lack the human activity. We're lacking all this AI-generated crap. So the idea of live streaming your recording, which I don't know where you would get that idea from, Leo, and then taking the edited version and publishing it on audio, that is the bulletproof way to do a really successful podcast right now.

1:47:52Excellent. Thank you very much. Don't edit. Don't over edit. Don't do anything crazy. And I can totally set you up just because we're friends of the network.

1:48:01Ant Pruitt:And whatever you do, don't be a cat because... Oh, God. Or is it a fox? That's a fox. I was going to say, that's a fox, surely. What does a fox say? whatever you do don't be a cat there we go sorry i clicked on the wrong animal yeah uh because that nobody wants that actually you could do that ian and then well did you ever see the the famous clip of the lawyer who yes your honor i am not a cat yes speaking of animals uh fits the wonder dog is uh is fussing at me well we'll let fits go because i have to do wait a minute i this is wrong I have to do a commercial and I better fix this before I do the commercial.

1:48:46Ant Pruitt:That would be terrible. That would be, that would be kind of ironic, wouldn't it? All of a sudden. Cause we have to send these out. I can't, I can't, I think, Oh, that's what you should do. Ian go with the mustache. Oh, no, that mustache was terrible. Cause every time you took, every time you took a swig, every time you took a swig of tea. what's wrong with you that's a terrible i look like ron jeremy when i had that mustache yeah that's why we loved it that's why we loved it all right now i will do a commercial you go walk the dog uh or whatever it is you need to do uh you're watching this week in tech with owen thomas ian thompson and doc rock i like it two syllables very simple this week in tech brought to you this week by ethos uh it's father's day you know and i think one of the most important things that happened to me when i became a father was knowing suddenly i'm responsible i'm responsible for this little family that i've created here one of the very first things i did is go out and get life insurance because i knew if anything happened to me and you never know uh my family would be at risk I think it's really, for this Father's Day, this might be something for you dads to think about.

1:50:06Ant Pruitt:And I want to tell you, our sponsor, Ethos, makes getting life insurance fast and easy. And you know, it's easy because it's 100 % online. You can get a quote in seconds. You can apply in minutes. You can get same-day coverage. And here's something I love. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions. And you can get up to$3 million in coverage. some policies as low as 30 a month and you'll get your lowest rate from their network of trusted carriers so take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through ethos get your free quote at ethos.com twit that's e-t-h-o-s dot com slash twit application times may vary and rates Mayfair ethos.com slash twit it really did it did you know it's funny when the kids were born I was a DJ you work in a you know a kind of low-paying DJ job uh and it was just me and Jennifer and you know I figured well this is fine but as soon as the kids come into your life holy cow um your perspective really does uh change and i'm very glad we did it although i will say to all three of you uh because you don't have kids you didn't make a the wrong choice

1:51:34put it that way remember that it was like people thought we were rich right but i was like yo we could pay 750 an hour bro to sit here and talk on the radio or something crazy but i will say free food and free drinks is about anywhere in town went a long way in a tourist town. I'll tell you that. Yeah. Well, I mean, my mom was, I was talking to my mom for her birthday and she's like, you realize you were, you know, A, overweight when you were born and also two weeks late. And I was like, mom, I had accommodation, free food, free drink. If you'd given me a TV in there, I would have been up there for another month.

1:52:08Ant Pruitt:I would never have left the room. I know. Well, I feel fortunate because my kids were born in 92 and 94. The internet was around, but it wasn't anything like it is today. They had those CD-ROMs, the learning CD-ROMs, and they called it lapware at the time because you'd put the kid in your lap because you'd have to kind of control it and set up. And that was a great experience. By the time Abby was a teenager, Neopets had come out. i think she was maybe 12. oh my word that takes you back yeah remember neopets they're actually i think they're still around and but i was a little nervous about it but she but it was like myspace she learned how to make web pages she really enjoyed it and i we had a little talk i said now there may be some adults on there pretending to be kids you should really be careful about any information you reveal and you know and she said dad i said what i'm a 33 year old man from philadelphia i know better smart yes i thought oh i guess i don't have to worry about her she she knew of course intuitively not to reveal what school she went to not to get intimate conversations with strangers online it's a little different today though and i think kids are i understand why uh you know it's the inclination of governments and parents to ban social media right now congress is uh considering renewing the kids online safety act it's in uh in committee in uh the senate uh meta is actually lobbying in support of it that's because they got the lawyers to deal with it well that's you know it's called regulatory capture where you you know once you've got established you make sure that the ladder is pulled up exactly there's all the information they need to make it work they already got and so if they can cut the line now they got the upper hand right they've already seen the deck they have been lobbing lobby and by the way when i say meta i think instagram is the maybe you'd say tiktok but i think instagram is the number one culprit here uh in the algorithmic feeds the way it is very addictive the way kids use it It can use it to not only to bully, but to get body ismorphia, body image issues, get the wrong message about life.

1:54:34Ant Pruitt:I think Instagram really is. I mean, I can't think of another social network that is as risky for kids. Can you? TikTok possibly, but I think Instagram is the worst offender. And Roblox. I mean, you know, but so I'd be very careful my kid were on Roblox. Anyway, Meta has been lobbying lawmakers for legal immunity from child harm claims tied to platforms like Instagram. Using the COSA Act, the provision Meta is said to favor would shield online platforms for liability, undercutting thousands of cases, including cases that Meta has already lost. Remember, Meta lost that big case in Los Angeles, and that kind of opened the floodgate for thousands of other cases against Instagram.

1:55:24Ant Pruitt:What Meta wants is to convert COSA into a liability shield. They are facing currently more than 2 ,000 active lawsuits by children, families, and school districts and dozens of state attorneys general. attorneys general uh google and uh youtube and and meta lost that la trial and that was the trigger for all of that also meta got a big i think 300 million plus settlement uh against them in new mexico in a jury case yeah it's not the money so much i think for meta uh as as the risk of being shut down or restricted or an under 16 ban which would scare them one of the things they love about cosa is it would prevent states from creating their own rules they'd only have to deal with the federal rules and and this is what brought this to mind when you talked about apple they would like the gatekeepers to be responsible for the age gates sure they would yes i mean it's okay it's america you've legalized bribery and call it campaign contributions but this is basically what it's coming down to meta is scared stiff about having to ban people from their platform and therefore yeah let's get congress to write the rules that we want yeah and they have the lobbying uh horsepower to do it uh but on the other hand i commend apple at the wwdc conference last week they announced uh i think some really good additional features many of the features they announced by the way were already in the iphone but they announced they just labeled them and marketed it yeah right but but but one of the things they thought that they did that was new which is very good is they first of all they made it easier to turn on these child protections and they set up defaults they said we went out uh to the american pediatric association and other experts in child uh protection and and and talk to them about what research shows and we set default for the amount of screen time and things like that so that all a parent has to really do is turn it on and the defaults will be accepted they don't have to spend a lot of time configuring it figuring out well how much time should little joey get online they can change those defaults but having those defaults in there i think makes it a fairly simple thing for parents to do they also created a website for parents to explain all this and and to show what the defaults are and and to help them try to make those decisions for their kids.

1:57:58Ant Pruitt:And Steve Gibson has been arguing for this for a long time, saying, look, Apple and Google likely do know a lot about you, right? And if you set up an iPhone for a kid, and in that process you tell the iPhone, this kid is 13 or whatever, they also have a mechanism, an API mechanism, that Meta and others can use. It's already built in where the application could ask what age group is the user in and then turn off features or even block the application based on that. All of which seems to me to make more sense than having a hundred different or a thousand or a hundred thousand different ways of doing it and each application doing it itself and having to go through that process.

1:58:45Ant Pruitt:Why not just do it with Apple or just do it with Google and then let them tell the app? Doesn't that make sense? Yeah, I think the default thing is really important because, you know, it's been one of the bugbears of the industry that, you know, unless you set stuff by default, then chances are people won't use it. This was the big problem with, for example, two-factor authentication with Gmail. Ten years after they launched two-factor authentication, only 10 % of users were actually using it. So set it up by default, and they have to. Oh, God, that's deeply worrying, Leo. You're looking at my Discord.

1:59:21it i'll talk about it in a second finish your thought i didn't mean to distract you

1:59:25Ant Pruitt:look this is why we tell you look at the show don't look at me also i'm a black cat not a ginger all right all right now we have to show it when owen comes back i'll show him uh one of our great we have a lot of people in the club that do ai pretty fly for a cis guy does a lot of stuff this is us as a cat and look even the uh wardrobe is correct even owen's headset mic is glorious and it has your a japanese uh soccer i think i'd be more like a british short hair though you know yeah yeah you and ian are uh are uh orange cats well i was gonna say stumpy would be incredibly annoyed because she thinks of me as an honorary black cat but no i mean it's um it is quite just actually i when i was last time i was on we were talking about alan turing being replaced by uh the badger on the 50 quid note and one of the readers on the discord channel actually generated a picture within seconds of alan turing riding a giant badger and that was just marvelous it's amazing yeah the ai has totally taken over our discord channel ai and animated gifs it's great fun we love it so but i think this is a good idea um I'm sure Apple doesn't want the liability.

2:00:42Ant Pruitt:But on the other hand, this is a way to make parents feel pretty good about what Apple's doing, I think. Yeah. I'm just worrying about Meta trying to legislate its way out of liability for bad actions. I don't think that's a good thing. That I don't like so much. So the interesting thing about, I want to protect Section 230. So I should say that up front. And that protects me. I'm not worried about Meta or anybody, any other big tech company, but it protects me. We have this Discord chat. We have forums at twit.community. We have Amastadon at twit.social. In every case, Section 230 protects me as the person running the site from something illegal that's posted on the site by one of our users.

2:01:29Ant Pruitt:Of course, I moderate and I take stuff down as quickly as I can. Section 230 also protects my right, by the way, to moderate. That's very important. So I'm not trying to say that a company like Meta is responsible for every post on Facebook or Instagram. I think Section 230 protects them, and rightly so there, as it protects me. But I also think, and this is what the jury ruled in the Los Angeles case, that these companies have designed their algorithm in a way to make their stuff more sticky, more addictive. did and that is a so the jury very cleverly and i think probably it was the prosecution who's thought this up or the plaintiff's uh attorneys who thought this up say this is a defective product this is not this is not about uh section 230 this is about a company that's created a defective addictive product just like a cigarette manufacturer has created an addictive product uh and they should be liable for that and the jury agreed actually uh the jury in new mexico agreed the judge agreed in los angeles so i think that was the right thing to do i don't disagree with that i know a lot of people really were concerned about that ruling yeah i mean it's it's kind of like do you remember the foster cester uh act yeah which was introduced yeah oh there's the doggy i didn't don't show the doggy the picture of you as a cat he might get a little bit upset i'm just saying ah it's the wonder dog yeah that is not your owner as a cat okay good i'm glad he got his i'm glad he got his walk-in on that's great it's amazing uh the dog can't last three hours i can the dog cannot make it through the show all right well we won't we won't go three hours we'll try to that's true you're you're in the chair solid i have to be here i have to do the ads and everything so we're just talking about apple's uh changes to the uh iphone to protect families and i think given it's father's day i think it's appropriate to to think about this a little bit i think they built this is their website for a child safety uh and it gives i think now i have to say and our panelists on mac break weekly uh i think john gruber said this it really is kind of to get ahead of governmental regulation not so much to give the family something they need is to keep government off their back but i think this is where it should happen and i think apple is in a good position to do this i i think that's where you set it up is in the iphone when you give it to the iphone and google should do the same with android Right.

2:04:19Ant Pruitt:I have no problem with this. I think Meta should be liable. I don't think COSA should be written in such a way that Meta is not liable. But I do think section, see this sounds kind of contradictory, but section 230 is very important. So it's a complicated story. I feel like we're starting to thread our way through this one. Yeah, I mean, I think the extent to which you can give parents, you know, real tools to, you know, to help monitor and, you know, maybe control their kids' usage. I mean, the truth is, like, a lot of adults need these, you know, need these usage monitoring tools themselves.

2:05:06But, you know, to the extent it's built in and it's kind of done in a thoughtful way. We know that kids are grabbing for their parents' iPhone as soon as they realize that mom and dad are spending X number of hours a day with these devices. They want to do what mom and dad are doing. So it's a reality. And you're right about the fact that a lot of it has to do as well with even some of the parents. I think that we should almost – it's kind of hard. we should have a tech literacy push back in the country not only for the kids that are going through school but even to readopt some of the adults who've already finished school already finished college everything there should be a push where if you're going to make it patriotic one of your patriotism things should be that you should become tech literate now because interesting being tech illiterate is actually probably more dangerous for our national security in just about anything but you got a whole bunch of people who stand on their fake patriotism they they can't even open up their Microsoft we're good and like you know making decisions based on what's good for the country not good for the country with a very low tech IQ and at one point it was like well tech's gonna take over everything take over a job so I don't want to know that stuff I want to do that and then you know those of us who dove in head first and we've always seen what the possibilities are and now we're almost fighting for it because of the fears that it's going to do more harm than good well a lot of the reason why misinformation works is because you're not tech literate a lot of the reason why some of the other things uh that are bad for you as far as tech goes doesn't work is because well you're not tech literate so like you're like you said when your kid was on neopets knew right away let me make my profile that i'm a 33 year old man from philly she was tech literate wasn't she that was i was impressed you understand that was small so i've always fought for this when it comes to my niece i've always told my sister-in-law that we don't have to worry about emma because she doesn't have a low self-esteem as a kid that grew up in the hood and why now maybe that's the key and watch the kids that did bad the reason why i didn't get involved in all the possibilities for me to get involved to when i was a hood is i was a high self-esteem.

2:07:21As a matter of fact, I was cocky. So kids with high self-esteem are harder to get taken in by someone who's trying to convince them to do elsewise, right? And even if you take it to the simplistic nature of getting grown adults to believe that some other adults are going to come over and steal all of their jobs, that's an esteem problem, bro. Because I tell you what, I walk around Ecamm like I'm not going to get fired because I know I do a good job. you know what I mean it's possible like we could lose money and the boys could you know worry about it you don't worry but I don't worry about that because I know estimatically I know what I put into the company right and I know what I'm able to bring to the table and so we're having these conversations about the tech side but oh and to just add words to the fire are we doing anything to regulate sugar and all the other crap that's bad guns in the schools.

2:08:12Or guns. You know what I'm saying? Like, we're hard up on this tech stuff, but we're not touching the guns and the sugar, which are probably more dangerous.

2:08:19Ant Pruitt:Yeah, that's a good point. The biggest cause of death among children now is guns. Yeah, it's really crazy. And actually, Moose, I want to give you credit. Moose Espionage said it's not even just the tech leaders, it's just literacy in general. Because at some point in time, and I think all of us, I don't know if we just beat it or we have better parents. But at the moment we use 84 is a good number. I was graduating at that time but at 84 when we realized That kids that were coming from you know say lesser means were able to stand toe-to-toe against the quote-unquote private schools where they went out of their way to make it so that their kids can have the leg up and They started stopped investing into schools and one of the first ones I remember this argument full-fledged in mid 70s was putting computers in our school and The only reason why we got computers in our school is because of where we were next to NASA that a bunch of the parents who worked at NASA Put the computers in the schools ourselves and then it was like oh parents cannot donate computers to schools It has to come from the Board of Education I remember this fight short grits as groceries and we had a Commodore pet Right the ugly square trying to triangle yeah Commodore pet That's when I got addicted was the Commodore pet in about sixth or seventh grade And that came from one of the parents that worked at Natsa in Beltsville It's the case go ahead.

2:09:45I mean that's how Bill Gates got his start Yeah, you know the parents in his school organized a fund to buy computing time for the kids Right, and that's how you know Microsoft kicked off in the first place I mean I'm I'm slightly tricky about the importance of, I mean, computers in schools, valuable, but there's been a lot of research recently that if you're actually learning from a computer, you don't remember facts as much as if you actually had to write stuff down. And I think you're still going to have to write stuff down to actually, quite frankly, you know, I mean, it astonishes me that computers are now to the point where you can write your university finals exams on a computer with an internet connection and that should be banned right off the bat.

2:10:35Ant Pruitt:Harvard's bringing back provosts for their exams because they don't trust kids anymore not to cheat. Yeah, I mean there's no way you should. It's absolutely the case that a well-educated literate populace is good for the economy, is good for the country it is also the case that a well-educated literate populace is bad for certain politicians and uh and if they're trying to hoodwink people uh to get them to vote for them if they're trying to fool them with scare campaigns and scare ads then having an educated electorate is not a good thing i hate to think that that's what's going on i hate to think that to it sounded so conspiracy theorist, but more and more the, what's the word I want to say, anecdotes, it's not anecdotes, but more and more the circumstantial evidence just keeps stacking.

2:11:30Like there were definitely things with adjusting the school boards. I mean, let's go to gerrymandering. That's an easy way to put it. Like there was gerrymandering even back in the education system. And it's like, well, these kids can't get that smart because if they get too smart then you know now we gotta you know take care of them or kind of situation and the whole thing that again i don't know why we keep on reagan today but coming up with the myth of the welfare mom like that's just dumb bro like nobody's gonna have kids to make more money bro that's just really stupid i'm kind of reminded of the old george carlin sketch where he was talking about this and he's just like they want they want people to be educated just enough to push the buttons and pull the levers uh not any more than that and it's just like you watch that from 30 years ago and you're kind of like well that was actually surprisingly on point i mean and the reality though is like the the ai the ai job effect is it's going to make jobs more complicated and require more education more critical thinking yes and um you know it to the extent it's not eliminating getting jobs it's transforming them and raising the bar for what we need as a society from our

2:12:42Ant Pruitt:education one one would hope that every elected official in this country is rooting for this country to be the best it can be to be the smartest and the strongest and the most effective and uh this is the same government that actually added a journalist to a signal conversation about was about weapon strikes but you know i mean you know i i think in the best of all possible worlds elected officials are there not to enrich themselves or gain power because they want to make the place a better place and one would hope that that's why people are trying to get elected we could disagree about what makes it a better place i understand that but uh we should all be wanting to make it better uh it doesn't seem to be the case always and uh those are the people you should not vote for that's all i have to say about that uh waymo speaking of mistakes is now recalling its robo taxis because they're driving into highway construction zones uh there are at least 13 instances now waymo is in san francisco you boy oh and you see him ever i was in san francisco on wednesday every third car is a waymo now in san francisco oh i mean when i'm up early going to the gym like it's me it's me on a bike and a bunch of waymos do you feel safer with the waymos um you know they they do tend to stop more you know what they drive generously yeah yeah um so like if they detect you know my presence on a bike they tend to just reflectively i read somebody saying driving away mo is weird because they're over cautious in some areas and then they they step on it they floor it another area yeah i want to know if owen if the way more ever pull up to a whistle and be like look at those hams i mean my mom was over over for Thanksgiving, and I wanted to take her in one, and she flat out refused.

2:14:43She's like, I'm not going to do it.

2:14:45Ant Pruitt:I've never been in one. It makes me nervous. I understand. No, I mean, they're really safe. I mean, I took one on Saturday night in San Francisco. Yeah, I know. We're coming to that. We're coming to where they're maybe not so safe. They felt really safe. Plus, you can choose the soundtrack that you listen to. So in my case, it was the Knight Rider theme tune. Oh, there you go. I'll tell you one thing that every American should have to experience, though. I had my first ride in the black taxi and we were going from Waterloo to Heathrow, right? It's kind of expensive. Oh, the London cab. It was easier.

2:15:19Well, it turns out having a flight, actually I flew on Sunday, but moving from Waterloo to Heathrow on a Saturday during football, dumb. Okay, very, very dumb. But the way that this guy knew every single back road, when I found myself in Kent, I'm like, why the heck am I in Kent? Well, because according to Google Maps, if you went on the freeway, you'd be done. Because by the time you'd come out by the G-Tech Stadium where Brentford played, there was just a lot of traffic at that time, right? No, I mean, London taxi drivers do a thing called knowledge, which is a five-year test. That's why it was three, but it's five?

2:15:56Yeah. Oh, my God. It was brilliant. What do they have to know in the knowledge? Everything. Every single road in London. I mean, literally. So they have Google Maps in their brain, basically. In their brain. Pretty much, yeah. Yes. I mean, there's a reason why they get paid so much. I'm sorry. Do you understand on a Saturday or a Sunday when there's game time? Like, of course, when the stadium is getting out, like, everything is messed up, right? So all the stations, you saw, literally, in the Premier side, there's six teams. If you count the under teams, like, there's almost 20 teams in London proper, right?

2:16:29Yeah. And so when everybody's playing on a Saturday towards the end of the season, it's a madhouse. And yet it was just it was like it was like butter bro. And there was a UFC fight that night as well So this guy just got through traffic like nobody and everybody should experience it at least once and how well they get paid They basically they self-employed so But it's good. They know what you're saying. Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's it's it's very good money and they defend it quite I remember when uber launched in London and And so taxi drivers didn't protest about it. They just went around to the Uber office and completely trashed it.

2:17:08Ant Pruitt:They knew the way to the Uber office, which was really impressive. Yeah, the taxi was better than Uber. Uber was dooky, and so was Bolt. I didn't really like Bolt, but just do the taxi. It's better. So what about self-driving vehicles? Are there self-driving vehicles in the UK? Waymo is launching in London this year. Yeah, I saw them testing. Yeah, there are only tests at the moment. an uber driver may not know every road they may not have the knowledge but we know the waymo does right yeah i mean i'm a little bit concerned because uh waymos have an awful lot of very expensive hardware in easily smashable places on the outside of the car i get the feeling a couple of london cab drivers are going to have a take a more direct action approach against the competition that'll be interesting so it's not the first time waymo has been yanked so what they do is they slowly expand its capabilities it was only recently they allowed waymos on the freeway at all right unfortunately since they did that there have been 13 instances of robo taxis driving into highway sections that were closed for construction you know lights barricades barriers all of that stuff they go plow right through it six of them were in phoenix arizona in april seven occurred in san Francisco in May.

2:18:25Ant Pruitt:So May 19th, Waymo pulled all its robo taxis from highways and they are working on a fix. So the Waymo's are still going, but they're only on city streets. It's not the first time they've done this. You may remember, in fact, it's the sixth time. You may remember Waymo recalled its robo taxis after they kept driving into flooded roads. Yeah. And in December, they had a recall to address the vehicle's illegal behavior around school buses low speed collisions with chains and gates and telephone poles have been a problem and there was another one solving a problem regarding regarding towed trucks i mean on the on the plus side they haven't killed anyone yet it's not like this is the uber self-driving car which actually killed a cat they killed a cat oh yes the bodega cat yeah cat much more beloved cat yeah yeah I actually think they have killed one pedestrian in Phoenix did they not was that Waymo or oh no that was GM that was the that was the General Motors cruise that was Uber I think okay yeah with a test driver in the car I should right yeah it's true that she parked on someone after they knocked off that was another uh didn't kill him uh so that's the that's the good-ish news waymo says they've driven more than 170 miles autonomously they have demonstrated a 13 times reduction in serious industry injury or worse crashes when compared to human drivers i believe that i mean we're humans are terrible drivers oh yeah i mean i i used to work in embarcadero and you just looked out the window and you would see as you pointed out owen three or four waymos just circulating around so i'm not sure they actually cut down on traffic per se but there's certainly safer than human drivers and i've got a friend who also cycles in the city and he says he feels a lot more comfortable having a waymo coming up behind him than he does a human driver you at least know it's paying attention the human driver may not be uh we're most going to launch in 20 more cities this year including london and tokyo so they're in tokyo is going to be will be in a way good but not in the major parts like in the outside side of streets i think it will be good because people are very good about not not being in the streets during the crosswalk and things of that nature for instance here in hawaii it is like a 400 and something dollar fine to enter the crosswalk once the numbers start counting right you're not supposed to enter once the numbers start counting you know what everybody does as soon as they see the number they try to run across the street you know what else we have a lot of in honolulu people over the age of 70 because that's where you you make your money you come here to retire leo wink wink i got a couple spots open in my building um dude i see dudes enter the street the number's on seven and i'm like yo papa you cannot make that crossing in seven seconds dog so now everybody is waiting and people in tokyo just don't do that so i think it might be okay in tokyo but those side streets are really skinny bro they're tiny same in london i mean there's a lot of streets down there that are just like I remember when there was a lot of talk about people in London buying wanktacks, sorry, Cybertrucks.

2:21:41Trying to get one of those down a London street is just impossible. And in fact, they're illegal in the UK because they're not built for...

2:21:48Ant Pruitt:Cybertrucks? The Tesla Cybertruck is illegal in the UK? They're illegal in UK and Europe because... To why? Well, no, it's not that. They're not built for pedestrian crashes. So under EU and UK law, you have to have the car designed in such a way as to minimise the chance of a pedestrian getting hit by one. Well, if a pedestrian gets hit by one, they're not going to get killed. So you have rounded fronts. Oh, that's interesting. If you're familiar with the Mazda Miata, they used to have pop-up headlights. Those went because pop-up headlights will knacker a pedestrian if you run into them. This is why, you know, things like the F-150 and other American gargantuan trucks aren't sold over there.

2:22:34Ant Pruitt:You could not see anybody under six foot tall over your hood on an F-150. I mean, they're just, or at least the 250, the big ones. They're really big. I mean, I try driving one once. It's terrifying. I'm like, you got to run. I wonder why. What is it about little guys in big trucks? When you guys have been here and seen the way we lift the truck, right? Everybody has a truck that's like seven feet off the ground here. and like the people get out of it and they're like little tiny dudes you gotta stay all right let's take a little break here uh if anybody's dogs need walking this would be the time it's good he's he's napping oh oh yeah what a sweet that's uh we don't have that much time that's oen thomas from the san francisco business times and his little doggy fritz uh fits or fit fritz short for Fitzgerald oh oh it's cute F Scott F Scott it's got Irish doggy a little Scotsman known as Ian Thompson also about a Scots of the Duke of Edinburgh was but yes all right well he's from Edinburgh yeah well he was from Greece but yeah okay that's true first you're about philip yeah yeah uh and of course from hawaii are you a hawaiian uh no that's a that is gets people in the mainland in trouble like native hawaiians is a kingdom it's a set of people and they stole we stole the land from them and so actually we did it first but true story i always have to correct my mainland people like i am from hawaii but i'm not hawaiian it's not the same thing as being californian like i'm just from hawaii we don't we were in uh when we we were in the big island and we loved it by the way just loved it a couple last month and uh you gotta go down and see the captain cook statue but i think that's where that's where they killed captain cook i think yeah that's where they killed him and ate him yes and after this week i'm gonna go put a cone on his head is that what you do i want to now now just make it more fun because everybody's fans there's if you ever go to glasgow there's a statue of uh the duke of a traffic cone on its head and every time the council removes it the traffic cone goes back on and apparently in boston when the scots fans came over an awful lot of statues ended up with traffic cones on their heads oh but um yes if you if you check it out there's it's almost certain tons of them it's so good he does kind of it does kind of beg to have a traffic cone on his head oh well It's a perfect fit.

2:25:13There's a drag queen on RuPaul's Drag Race UK who did that statue as one of her outfits. Oh, I love it. Oh, right. The thing is, the Duke of Wellington isn't popular in Scotland, and there is actually a verse of the national anthem, which is seldom sung these days, and with a rush for rebellious Scots to crush. But yeah, he's not that popular, and the traffic cone is just every... The council stopped trying to take it down because, you know, it would be gone, and then the next night it would be up there again. And now Boston's getting its fill of that as well. Sometimes even the horse gets a traffic cone on its head.

2:25:51It's like, now the new phrase is going to be, nothing under the kilt, cone on the head, let's party. Well, you always get asked when you wear a kilt, what do you wear underneath it? And there are three answers. My great uncle, who left me his kilt when he died, said there are three answers to that. If you're on the pull and looking to meet up with a nice lass, then it's the future of Scotland If it's anyone and anyone in general, then you say my courage and if you're looking to start a fight you say your wife's lipstick Oh I like it. I like it I've always wanted to buy a boy tartan because my last name is Scottish And so I've always wanted to go buy one and my my goal is to get there I'd have a buddy who I met when I was in UK her husband used to work for Dalmore so he says if I ever come back like he can connect me to a lot of the whiskey places that I would want to visit very nice worked in the industry for like 40 years so I can't wait to go back excuse

2:26:45Ant Pruitt:me for just a second I think there's loud music downstairs I'm gonna close the door oh Leo if it's too loud you're too old oh dude do you apply for us this guy is winning the chat today this is great no I mean second what seven years ago Facebook reminded me um yeah we went on a uh we did the north coast 500 which is a tour around the north coast of scotland scotland and on the very first night there was a bar there with 200 whiskeys and it was great for planning out because it's just like right i'll try that yeah we'll pop by that distillery and that distillery and that distillery and it saved us an awful lot of driving so good we all wish we were there right now but we're not we're right here doing this week in tech which is brought to you this week by Box.

2:27:33Ant Pruitt:You know that name. If you're an enterprise trying to transform your business with AI, you're likely facing an all too common challenge. Most AI tools are good at public knowledge. That's what they're trained on. But do they know your business? No, of course not. Do they know your product roadmaps? Well, how would they? Your sales materials, your HR policies? I hope not. Your financial models, the content that actually makes your company run well they can this is where box comes in box is building the intelligent content management platform for the ai era and this you're going to love this because it serves as a secure essential context layer for boxes ai agents to access the unique institutional knowledge that makes a company run.

2:28:23Ant Pruitt:Public models, your information securely stored as a context layer inside Box, that's the way to do it. That's the key idea. The power of AI doesn't come just from the model alone. It starts with the model, but it comes from giving that model access to the right enterprise content, your source of truth, right? Box's recent state of AI in the enterprise report found that 96 percent of organizations say agents need access to company specific data that's almost everybody but only 36 percent have connected agents to trusted content across many use cases everybody knows you need to do it but so few do well box makes it easy box goes beyond file storage to connect content to people apps and ai agents so teams can turn information into action.

2:29:15Ant Pruitt:With tools like Box Agent, Box Extract, Box Hubs and more, organizations can accelerate knowledge work, they can pull intelligence from unstructured content and automate workflows. Box Agent is a unified AI experience across all your files. It can understand your natural language prompts, it can pull the right content and help you work through the task. I have to say It's been my own experience that the model alone is not enough. Supplying it with knowledge about yourself, about your business, turns it into such a useful tool. For agents, both inside and outside Box, including tools, by the way, you're not stuck with any one model like ChatGPT, Copilot, you can use Gemini, you can use AgentForce, you can use custom agents.

2:30:01Ant Pruitt:Box becomes the trusted content and file layer by its platform APIs. It has an MCP server. It has CLI. So these agents can use that information and it stays secure. It stays in your enterprise. It doesn't get exfiltrated out to the AI. For enterprises, the trust layer is everything, right? Box is built with security, with compliance, with governance and threat protection in mind. So employees and agents only access the information they're authorized to use. That's vital. If you're thinking seriously about your company's AI transformation journey, think beyond the model. That's not enough. Your business lives in your content and Box helps you bring that content securely into the AI era.

2:30:46Ant Pruitt:This is one of the really important insights that helps AI become so valuable to your business. Visit box.com slash AI if you want to learn more. Box.com slash AI. box.com slash AI. Well, here come the AI specs. And it's not from maybe who you thought it would be from. Yes, it's not meta. It's not Apple. It's actually the company that first started, oh man, I've been logged out again of Bloomberg. this is this is what uh john gruberg calls a dick over it's not a popover i'm already paying for bloomberg but for some reason it's just decided to cover the entire page i was going to tell you about snap's new spectacles yes snap is launching ar spectacles they are not cheap 2195 dollars they don't make you look super cool I was going to say they kind of remind me of a friend of mine is in the American military and the glasses they issue with you issue with if you need glasses these are army they're basically called rape protection glasses because they're that ugly we call them BCGs, birth control glasses alright, ok so on the left, actually this is Harry, thank you for not locking me out this is Harry McCracken's article at Fast Company instead of Bloomberg.

2:32:19Ant Pruitt:On the left, that's the original Snap Spectacles, which I had. They didn't have AI. They just had a camera built in. They looked kind of cool. On the right is these new 2026 Spectacles. Harry calls them the great, great, great grandchild of the original Snap Spectacles. Check out Emma Jean on the bottom. I don't... I don't... You know, I really am a believer in this form factor for AI. But these are damn ugly. These really are BCGs. And they're real expensive. Yeah, I mean, also they're kind of... I don't like them because... Any of the glass form factors, because they're kind of intrusive. I was reading an article about one journalist who was checking into a hotel, and he actually asked the...

2:33:11The receptionist was wearing them, and he said, can you take those off, please, because you're about to look at my credit card, and I really don't want that information. Fair. It stayed on, you know, and it's, honestly, I have a friend who wears the Meta glasses, and whenever he has them on, I just, I don't want to be scanned when I'm walking down the street. You'll get over it. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. You'll get over it. You're going to have to. Everybody's going to have them. I absolutely love these, though. Oh, I got them, too. Yeah. These are my Gen 1s. I just bought new Gen 2s. They're actually charging upstairs.

2:33:44Did you? You bought the new ones? I got the same case exact one. Yeah. The lady in the store misinformation said they don't work, but it turns out the case is interchangeable. But I did get the new Gen 2s. And what I really like about them, where they really come in handy, is a lot of times when I'm sitting in an airplane, whatever, we haven't done a takeoff yet. I haven't put on my other headphones yet. I can still hear what I'm listening to. And what's going on. I can still hear what's going on. So my number one use case for them is listening to podcasts or something when I still need to be ambiently aware of what's going on.

2:34:17The other thing that it works really well for, like I said, I do my walk-in talks, my ADHD brain dumps where I have to get in my steps. So I walk and I just basically brain dump new idea or a client thing that I'm working on or something. And I just record all of that and I have it going into Whisperflow. And then from Whisperflow, I basically convert it into things. So it's a little bit better than Plod in a sense, but yeah, I don't go around creeper recording.

2:34:42Ant Pruitt:so you can um so okay this is good to know so you can use the metaglasses to feed into your own ai transcription service yes i use a combination of whisper flow and audio pen and i just keep switching back and forth because is there an a is there a sdk an api is there an mcp server i use it just as the microphone for the one that's on the app on the phone i didn't want to put it into the glasses per se um because i don't trust men i mean that's my dream eventually tie these to your ai yeah and and then everything that you see becomes part of the you know the valuable information here's a picture of imogene heap wearing them she doesn't look too bad notice they tint they have a variety of tints they can apply so they're trying to make them somehow kip i guess we can get over it uh what uh darren okey says in our discord chat is is actually a good point which is if you don't tie them to a phone and snap doesn't have a phone meta doesn't have a phone they're inevitably going to be clunky because they have to put more computing into the glasses more battery more computing these only run for four hours uh although you can charge them up to four times with the case also hey this video so like really long when you're just listening to things listening to music or whatever they do one really long another reason why these come in super super handy is being um I travel a lot.

2:36:05And, of course, when I go to Japan, I can read like an eighth grader. I can read like an eighth grader. But anything harder than that, I got to be like, hey, what does this say? And unlike many countries, Japan does not make any concession to English.

2:36:21Ant Pruitt:It's in Japanese. It's in Japanese. Yeah. That's actually one of the pro tips. When you go to a restaurant and say no English menu, oh, that's going to be off the chain. It's going to be much better. You don't want to go to the ones that... They have to convince them. They don't want... won't a lot of people say they're being mean or racist they don't want to let you in because they don't want to give you bad surface because they can't communicate right so normally when i say they go ah okay come in come in come in they're excited now not only get to hang out they get to you know watch me screw up my japanese or whatever but snaps trying to get over the hump of these ugliness by having what they call specs visionaries here's a gold state warrior jimmy butler wearing them see if you get enough famous hipsters wearing them maybe people will get say oh you know this it's very very expensive yeah i mean the the celebrity thing didn't work with google glass why would it work now yeah glass was weird and asymmetrical like you know yeah no i mean i i remember when google class glass came out um google got really quite annoyed with the register because we coined the term glassholes and used it in every single article.

2:37:31And eventually, I mean, we had angry phone calls from their PR, just like, no, we're not going to give you one to review when you're calling. I get bad news for him. Well, no, I mean, the triumph was when Google actually used the term itself in a press release saying, don't be a glasshole. And it was just like, yes, nailed it. Does that predate the term for Glasswegians or after? no no you don't you you don't insult glaswegians now if i wore traffic on my head while wearing people say that yeah it might be okay well they also have the phrase the glasgow kiss which is being head-butted so yeah you definitely don't want to do that we say that about massachusetts people we call them mass holes so yeah yeah that's right that actually predates glass holes anyway

2:38:15Ant Pruitt:uh harry says they no longer look like a cyber truck affixed to your face i might disagree with that oh yeah uh that no pussy let's shouldn't run into any pedestrians with them on oh my gosh this guy is killing me unlike in many products uh it's self-contained no external battery pack input device other than your hands or dependency on a smartphone that's why they're so clunky uh they weigh they don't weigh that much 100 they were four four and a half to 4.8 ounces that's not that heavy i don't know but you know leo in because of uh sort of k-pop slash hip-hop the style of glasses that these are is very common right chunky kind of big yeah so a ray band just dropped the new a collaboration with asap rocky and they're the puffier ray bands but uh all over people's a bunch of brands tom ford they have these sort of giant thick frames that that are built off the original Blues Brothers Wayfarer or the BCGs.

2:39:15And so they don't look that far removed, but they're like extra chunky. Right?

2:39:21Ant Pruitt:These have a heads up display built in, bigger than the Meta Ray-Ban displays. I think it was, let me see if I can find the angle of it. It doesn't fill your, it doesn't fill the whole screen, but it's about, I think it's two or three times bigger than the Ray-Ban displays. I want to say 51 degrees, but I have to find this in Harry's article. They have sound. They have, you know, many of... Harry points out the original Macintosh sold for$8 ,000 when adjusted for inflation. So$2 ,195 is not too outrageous. It is laptop cost. Can you do everything you can do with them that you could do with a laptop?

2:40:06Ant Pruitt:I don't think so. i think this is a very early product early adopters will probably be in very early adopters will be interested i don't see it as a mass appeal product by any means any more than the apple vision pros were i can't wait to see what apple finally gets around to though and apple has the iphone and i think that that's going to make a big difference because now you have the computing platform off the glasses in your pocket and it's internet connected uh it helps with weight it It helps with size. It helps with battery life. And it can have much faster processor, too. The iPhones are very heavy-duty processors now.

2:40:45Yeah. Neters are a little slow as far as the AI stuff goes in the glasses. So it'll be really interesting to see what Apple can do with especially dedicated access to the chips that are inside of our, you know, in-base iPhone.

2:40:58Ant Pruitt:Snap spun the business out into a subsidiary. It's called Specs, Inc. And these are the Specs. they have been seating developers with them for a while so there will be some stuff you could turn yourself into a cat or a lizard

2:41:19Ant Pruitt:you can twist your face like silly putty i don't know with whom i guess if you're in a call i don't know um snapchat shows you what your camera sees the moment you launch the app so that's kind of nice and that was something that ray-ban displays i i think do as well as you could finally see what your your glass because you can't write with these owen i'm sorry doc you can't no no see the i really thought hard about getting displays but i was like no i'm just getting the regular ones because i don't want to be heavy they're expensive well we'll see anyway snapchat is getting into the game with the chonky version of these, of these glasses, the specs.

2:42:01Ant Pruitt:And Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat said this, this we're counting on this going forward. You know what? A lot of the, a lot of the, I don't know what the terminology is. I don't want to call them influencers. I hate that word, but the Carly, the Kylie Jenner, Justin Bieber type client that grew up with making Snapchat at what it is today um they would be who they're going to use to kind of get people into this yeah and it's going to become a very expensive play for parents that have to buy their kids like two thousand two thousand maybe kylie jenner has one a thousand shemily has one yeah there you go charlemagne but i mean aren't there going to be knockoffs of the 100 yeah that's where the danger comes i think i'm going to do what everybody is saying i'm going to wait till apple comes up with It might not be next year.

2:42:51Ant Pruitt:It might be two years from now. But I think Chinese manufacturers are going to make a much cheaper, much better version of these, as far as I can see. But if you're not attached to an ecosystem, I don't know if it's a good thing to buy. I think you want to be attached to the Apple ecosystem. I think Snap would have been better to make them cheaper, but make it like, you know, platform-nostic, where it's very much a Snapchat thing. so they can bring it. Snapchat is secretly grown again, but to tie it directly into Snapchat and then use that as the play where they're going to make the money off the advertising later, that would have made more sense.

2:43:25But$2 ,000 is a lot, bro. Yeah. Especially if you need a prescription. Snapchat stock is down like 95 % plus from their 2021 high.

2:43:37Ant Pruitt:That's why they're saying we need this to survive. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost a pivot. it's a swing yeah swing and a miss uh fox is spending 22 billion dollars to buy roku oh my god i'm so mad and now the picture is starting to become a little bit uh clearer uh lachlan murdoch the ceo of fox says they're going to keep the two companies separate remember roku doesn't just make little streaming devices they make tvs and i think this is a big play for the streaming market and and the kinds of data that the tvs get the big play thus far would they i mean talk about letting your hand out on the table right we're sitting here with all the aces two weeks before world cup starts i get a notification on my apple tv that the fox sports app will no longer work what you need to get fox one okay i only have the fox sports app on my phone for two reasons football and football like other than that I don't use it I don't want to go anywhere near that network right I had the Fox regular app there because of there was a TV show at one point that I select that I don't longer watch but yeah they moved everything into one app and so when you go to look for your World Cup game there it'll be Lamine your mall and you know the Saudi player on the front and then right underneath it Fox shows all the the Fox shows that are like the I'm a patriot I'm a soldier let's watch army men do this kind of thing that's all on the next fold so even before you get to the fold there's all of the Fox sphere crap right underneath it exactly to get to the World Cup coverage you got to go down down down down down about seven times down the fold and then you can get to the hub that will take you straight into the World Cup now of course if you're if you know how to use nerd tech you can swipe left and get the tiny little menu and scroll all the way down to the bottom seven things down and find the one that says sports which will take you over but even when you get to that page there's the world cup banner then there's all the u.s football and baseball and whatnot uh nascar and then more shows about how the american might of this nascar driver and blah blah it's so it's all about selling fox propagandizing of the world cup hub on fox one is absolute dookie and it irritates the crap out of me let them get their hands on roku and oh my god brain cells are over well according to the verge there's unlikely to be any regulatory hurdles of course there's not not certainly in the united states that's so last century you know and even from the eu um because roku and fox have kind of a small footprint in the eu so So I worry what the doc was talking about is going to happen to Formula One when Apple fully takes it over.

2:46:28And we're going to see exactly the same kind of situation. This immediate consolidation used to be considered a bad thing, but it's very much the vogue at the moment.

2:46:38Ant Pruitt:Already they've introduced ads into my Formula One stream. I'm not too happy about that. Oh, really? it yeah the thing about fox that people forget is they own this uh you know this streaming service called tubi which is a fast or free ad ad supported television service in other words just free streaming with yes ads um but as netflix has shown as amazon has shown where you know where they've put in ad supported tiers where they used to just have you know the pure premium uh streaming video services people generally prefer to pay a little less or nothing and uh put up with some ads um you know we you know we we the media elite may not uh like them but that's it seems to be the world now there's basically two players um with good fast uh services it's fox and paramount Paramount has Pluto, which is a really good service.

2:47:41They're looking at ways to combine Pluto and Paramount+. And when you put all of the Warner Brothers content, HBO, into that system, it could be really effective distribution. All of these companies are looking for a post-broadcast, post-cable future. And I think this is Fox's answer. The scariest part about what Owen just said is now that Paramount Pluto play is Skynet dance. I'm going to call it Skynet. You do what you want. And then the other one is the Fox Roku play. Right. So, again, you talk about trying to get one handed side talking. And again, this is just TV, right? This is not news.

2:48:27This isn't that thing of the, you know, fake news versus whatever news. It's just regular TV. But when you're watching the World Cup and right now all of the commercials that haven't been bought before by somebody Has been filled in with commercials for to be oriented shows a whole bunch of like America first oriented show our shows and then man I have never seen so many ads for Jesus in the middle of World Cup Like I mean, it's not I mean, I'm trying to be facetious If you go by the the global scalar thing in the amount of people teams and stuff that are playing That's it would be I could see Catholic side Maybe maybe I could even see a little bit of the Islamic side of it in a commercial But all the commercials are like Jesus commercials, you know, like you just have to watch a welcome back on the Fox one app And it's you'll you'll see it you'll be like, oh my god, they're Counterprogramming like heavily with the ad space that they didn't sell because I think a lot of people were scared into believing or companies were scared into believing that World Cup wouldn't be big because of the weird stuff that has been going on here.

2:49:35Because of the FIFA Peace Prize. Yeah, there we go. I was trying to be nice about it. But if you see the counter-programming, I'm like, bro, if my brain was dirty and was ready to be washed, I could see how I could get bit. I could see how I could become a Fox fan watching the way you do it. You just have to go and see. Just watch one game in the Fox 1 app versus watching it on your regular TV. and you'll see exactly what I'm saying. You'll be like, oh my God. The only reason why I watch it is because it's 4K. The one that comes on TV is coming in 2K, which I think, again, they did on purpose.

2:50:04What are they going to do to Roku City, though? What's Fox going to do to Roku City? What's Roku City? That's the screensaver everybody watches. Oh, the little screensavers, yeah.

2:50:13Ant Pruitt:Oh, I do the aquarium. Yeah. You're going to see Gretchen Carlson floating by. But that's some of the most watched stuff on Roku is those screens. So they're going to put something there, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's... I see with Apple aerials, bro. Like, I get so many people that tell me that they just like to watch the Apple aerials, especially when you said... I like the aerials. The undersea. I love the aerials. You see, like, the dolphins and sharks and whatever. I love the aerials. One more. Speaking of underwater, Mid Journey has gone from generating images to full-body ultrasound scans.

2:50:46Ant Pruitt:I'm not sure how this works. mid-journey which was until you know maybe nano banana the dominant image generating uh tool we use it like crazy but i haven't used it in ages because the you know the frontier companies have kind of caught up so they announced a a new business a um uh ultrasound scanner full body scanner that they say uses 40 butterfly this is a ultrasound tech company butterfly network ultrasound on chip imaging modules and then they use midjourney's ai capabilities to analyze it to create a full body scan there's some question about what kind of resolution uh the scan is going to have and how useful it will be but they want to compete with companies like prenuvo who do $5 ,000, or maybe they're not quite that expensive,$2 ,000 MRIs, on-demand MRIs, not ordered by your doctor, but just for you.

2:51:48Ant Pruitt:They want to have these ultrasounds everywhere, and you just walk in and you get dunked in water. And then they plan to put 10 of the scanners into a mid-journey spa location in Union Square, which will open before the end of, Union Square, is san francisco by the way which will open before the end of 2027 and then they're going to uh try to try to do it all over the country it's a complete pivot for mid-journey it's interesting union square is becoming this hub for like ai companies oh is it really yeah used to be where macy's was right there's real macy's is still there uh but um macy's actually deployed uh some interesting location shopping technology back in the day so it's it's been a tech playground for a while uh union square uh but you've got the world coin you know the or oh that's right the orbs oh yes i went square yeah and i wouldn't be surprised if you saw more uh of these interestingly it's uh the mid-journey spa is specifically on grand avenue which is like a very high-end part of Union Square.

2:52:57It's not on the square proper. It's like that's where all the fancy... It's where the Apple Store is, right? Apple Store is on the northeast corner of Stockton and Post. It's a block from the Apple Store. This is a block east, and it's even posher. So it can't be cheap real estate. What their play is, is it visibility? That may be um you know it's hard to it's hard to understand how that fits with image and video generation

2:53:30Ant Pruitt:it's basically pushing all your chips into the middle you're betting the whole bank just like snap is doing on a on a high risk high reward bet and just crossing your fingers it's funny when you think about like at one point you would go down there i remember every time i had to go to union to go to Bong and Olsen just to watch the stereo go. I remember that. I remember that. You got Tiffany's, Saxon Avenue right there. Strangely enough, on the, I keep wanting to say Powell, but his post, on the post side, there's a donut shop that's like two steps away from the corner, which is off the chain that I used to always go to.

2:54:11But it's weird that that has become an AI thing. And I do remember when we first got, you know, like the uh macy's was doing the location based uh drops on your phone when you would walk in they were using beacon beacon ai because i knew somebody that worked there and that was like you know your iphone screen would show you things when you'd go into certain stores down there and it was like the test bed for all of that so i it makes sense the the lineage is there but yeah it's kind of a weird

2:54:37Ant Pruitt:play that's just in that one spot though take one more break and then wrap it up with some final stories you're watching this week in tech with ian thompson owen thomas doc rock so glad to have you of course all our club members changing my name make this show possible huh i'm changing my name to dachshund dachshund roxson thompson dachshund thompson sorry sorry leo in thompson rock rockin thompson and and some other hey rocking thompson i can live with rockin thompson i like it oh and the rock and toxin toxin no toxin is not good we'll figure it out we're working on it the ai will help us in just a bit uh our show today brought to you by zscaler the world's largest cloud security platform we talk about the potential rewards of ai and for any business it's it's something you can't ignore but the risks are there too and you don't want to ignore those the loss of sensitive data and attacks against enterprise managed ai and plus generative ai is a boon just as it is for your business for the bad guys for threat actors helping them create rapidly create phishing lures and write malicious code and automate data instruction and they can do this all at speed so it's very hard to fight some of it is just completely inadvertent just information leaked because your employees are using ai to analyze things like your your tax returns i think this is probably the source of this fact there were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to ai applications it's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private ai just ask chad pallet he's the acting cso at bioivt he says zscaler helped them reduce their cyber premiums their insurance premiums by 50 percent and at the same time double their coverage and improve their controls.

2:56:32Ant Pruitt:Take a look at this from Chad. With Zscaler, as long as you've got internet, you're good to go. A big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away from SD-WAN and VPN is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network. It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe-style environment. With Zscaler's Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust Architecture Plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance.

2:57:18Ant Pruitt:Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. Let me thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. We were talking earlier, I forgot to mention this. We were talking about the rising prices in commodities and memory. Nothing has canceled their inexpensive phone, their low price phone, the CMF phone, due to RAM prices. Nothing's Founder says we can't build the budget phone at a price that makes sense. Carl Pay said the RAM shortage has impacted most of the company's mid-range phones as well for the phone 4a memory cost doubled the memory is now the most expensive component in the smartphone more than half of the overall cost not good no you do wonder where this is going to end up I mean it could be one of the side benefits of the AI bubble finally popping as the memory prices come down when people always superficial data centers don't get built after all and there's a big surge of memory coming onto the market but it's not looking good at the moment uh you actually had a story in the uh san francisco business journal about the boom being caused by this ai IPO wave.

2:58:39Ant Pruitt:Let me close the pop-ups there. So the AI IPO wave is coming, but the Bay Area hasn't seen a boom like this one. How is it going to change the Bay Area? Yeah, this was written by my colleague, our editor-in-chief, Jeremy Owens. The key difference is that the wealth from these companies, it's going to be highly concentrated. When these companies grew so fast that the kind of early cohort of employees who got stock options was much smaller than, say, at Facebook or Twitter or Salesforce. You know, those companies kind of grew gradually over time, you know, raised several rounds of venture capital.

2:59:22OpenAI and Anthropic have done everything at kind of turbo speed. And their valuations are nearing a trillion dollars already as private companies. SpaceX, which now has an AI story, is, I believe, still worth about$2 trillion on the public market.

2:59:42Ant Pruitt:they minted what 400 millionaires with spacex stock and i think yeah that's some some like tens of centimillionaires cafeteria workers uh at spacex uh included which reminds you of the you remember the google massage therapist who yeah who got sock options or the or the meta the guy at meta who painted the mural on the wall yes the graffiti artist yeah they didn't want it they didn't want to give them money they gave them stock but you know this is not going to be like a broad-based uh kind of wealth generator uh it's it's going to be you know mansions in pacific heights and atherton um it's interesting your cover story actually uh points out that these companies are not leaving san francisco you know people like elon have famously moved to texas but open ai and anthropic are they have really put down roots and uh they've become uh you know Besides the near trillion dollar valuation, they're also both near or at a million square feet of office space.

3:00:43Wow. And, you know, that implies, you know, that implies employee counts in the, you know, in the high single thousands. You know, that's enough room for roughly, you know, off the top of my head, that's 6 ,000, 7 ,000 employees worth of space. Now, Anthropic has leased a big power for its headquarters. They have not moved in yet. That's going to be next year. So they're not there yet, but they really are planning on being large, large employers in San Francisco. I wrote about Salesforce overtaking Wells Fargo as the largest private sector employer in San Francisco. that happened several years ago, I believe 2018, 2019, we could easily see OpenAI or Anthropic, they're both growing quickly, overtaking Salesforce in not so many years in terms of employee count.

3:01:45Ant Pruitt:Will they take over that penis building downtown? You know, I think Salesforce has a long-term lease there. where Anthropic actually has kind of ordered the market on real estate around Salesforce Tower. There's a street, Howard Street. It's two blocks south of Market Street. And we've nicknamed it Anthropic Row because they have along basically three consecutive blocks of Howard Street, they have leases in like every building, 300, 400, 500 Howard. Have we seen this before with, I mean, Twitter was in San Francisco. You know, Twitter's not a bad comparison. When Twitter leased its space in 1355 market, that was seen as transformative for mid-market.

3:02:36Now, that didn't turn out. Twitter, of course, is now X, and they are completely out of San Francisco. They do have some operations in Palo Alto along with XAI. So they have not quit California despite the, you know, the reincorporation in Texas. But, yeah, I think, you know, that would be the biggest analogy or, frankly, Salesforce moving into Salesforce Tower.

3:03:01Ant Pruitt:That was a big statement, you know, a decade or so ago. Yeah, we still call it Salesforce Tower, but Salesforce didn't build it. True, yeah. They were just the flagship tenant. And, you know, ironically, roughly where OpenAI is now, Salesforce was going to put its campus there. Oh. But they decided it wasn't going to be enough space. So they snagged about a third of Salesforce Tower instead and became the namesake of the tower. This is the 20 ,000 square foot building that we'll call the Anthropic Squatty Building. Yeah. Yeah, that's a little building in Jackson Square. Jackson Square is still very popular with like smaller AI startups.

3:03:49It's a little neighborhood immediately north of where I'm sitting in the financial district.

3:03:54Ant Pruitt:It's a nice neighborhood. Yeah, I mean... And this is a little bit more, looks like more like an AI company. That's fancy schmancy. Now, that's part of a complex. you see it's actually four buildings around an intersection for you know more or less similarly designed buildings that's called foundry square and that's um you know history recently that's been leased by blackrock auric pwc so big financial law accounting firms uh now anthropic is taking over a lot of that how many employees do these companies have i mean isn't the whole point of that you don't need to have hundreds of thousands of employees?

3:04:34Well, you know, that's the interesting thing, right? Is, you know, you need, these companies are betting on adoption in the enterprise. And, you know, you can't just like AI your way into a Fortune 500 company. You need salespeople, you need sales engineers, you need, you know, consultants. They're going public. So you need accountants legal. Now, of course, they're all, you know, telling a good story about how they use AI to make their own internal operations more efficient. And I'm sure they're doing that. But the reality is they've got hundreds of open jobs at the moment that they're hiring for.

3:05:14Ant Pruitt:One million square feet of office space between OpenAI and Anthropik in downtown San Francisco. It's amazing. Yeah. And OpenAI has really cornered Mission Bay. Anthropik has cornered that part of the financial district where they are. They want dense, walkable campuses. They want that creativity. They want that vibe of being in person. So in a way, Amazon and Microsoft and Boeing kind of made Seattle what it is. And Amazon's kind of wild architecture in Seattle and so forth. And Microsoft founder who built that frank gary museum and so forth paul allen paula i wonder if san francisco is is going to be shaped by these ai companies in the decades to come much like seattle was i mean it was for a minute right and then it you know it kind of went away because um well it's been going through i mean san francisco went through a bad went through a bunch of changes right so that that building is is is it right across from the ferry building is that the market one one market building um one market is is interesting because it's really been struggling um right because that was twitter right uh no google was uh google was in one market you're right you've got a good memory uh salesforce before uh before it was in salesforce tower i had one market um as its long time home um but one market is actually we've written about the the kind of struggle that building has had with refilling vacancies, especially after Google pulled out.

3:06:48Google is still in San Francisco. They've got a building. Actually, I can practically walk out and see it. Yes, Spear Street. But also one maritime plaza. They have a big presence in that tower. They've also got offices in the Ferry Building, I was surprised to learn recently. Right, that's the corner, right? Market and Spear is where Market is. And then the Ferry Building, They used to have the bomb ass the rolly rolly truck. He used to make like oh, yeah, like prosciutto set up That's prosciutto. Yeah, not prosciutto. What's the word I'm looking for? Porchetta you can make the porchette the sandwiches like right there And so that's we always go cuz it's by the federal now you're making me hungry.

3:07:30Ant Pruitt:It's dinner time I don't think you should be talking That's the best thing in San Fran that and then again go up to the mission and go get a two-foot paper dosa but yeah so it's really weird because i remember one of my buddies worked at um what's the word with the salesforce back then he was my editor when i was at two he worked at salesforce and we used to go to that building and then go grab food across the street and so that whole area was like little pockets of tech and then it was like oh they smart they put it all in the financial area so you're saying now these guys pick their buildings up and go somewhere else where they get better better rate what's the reason for i'm just surprised san francisco has a reputation for being very expensive.

3:08:10Ant Pruitt:The big tech companies are down the peninsula in Silicon Valley, where the rent is cheaper in towns like San Jose. What is it about San Francisco that makes these companies want to? Well, there's been a reset. So prices are still not cheap, but there's been an opportunity kind of in this moment. The Stanford lie. Yeah. The thing is, it's FOMO, right? People want to be in the heart of the action. And right now the perception is, if you're an AI, San Francisco is where the heart of the action is. The big exception to that, of course, is SpaceX. They're putting their bets on XAI and Palo Alto. And of course, they can tap into Google and Meta, which are building up big AI labs, yes, and Mountain View and Menlo Park.

3:09:04so you know it's not it's not all or nothing there's going to be some stuff in silicon valley there's going to be some some stuff in san francisco but um venture capital too is like um is setting up the sf address yeah if they haven't already established some kind of little san francisco outpost uh there's an alley then they're they're going to be there's an alley right around the corner from us where three venture capital offices have popped up with little storefront signs.

3:09:40Ant Pruitt:I'm kind of happy to see that. I left my heart in San Francisco. I love the city. It's a beautiful little fishing village. It got really hammered during lockdown because I was working the city there. And it was like walking through the set of 28 days later. I mean, it was just dead. Yeah. We were talking about the World Cup at the top of the show. The vibe with World Cup watch parties is kind of off the hook. Interesting. I'm glad to see it coming back. I remember for us, dude, it was all about Moscone and Intercontinental and getting drinks at the Chieftain. I don't even know what's in Moscone Center area now.

3:10:23Oh, the Chieftain's still there. Yeah. Now, I got to say, Moscone, that area is still a little challenged. And especially, like, west of Moscone.

3:10:35Ant Pruitt:There's quite a homeless encampment down there. There's a big drug crisis down there. Yeah, and, you know, it's just like that kind of, you know, the kind of post-industrial renovated warehouse office space that was so popular during the dot-com boom, that's the kind of office space that landlords are really having trouble filling that's where tech tv was of course yeah as as you can as you can see like you know the the offices that um that anthropic and open ai are taking they're like new buildings big glassy open very different open floor plans um yeah you know ai companies generally want new move-in ready no no kind of you know no kind of quirks or charm just like no charm no history yeah yeah before we wrap up i usually uh end the show with uh memoriam there are a couple of people passed uh in this past week that i think deserve uh attention um one is somebody that i didn't know of but i so many of my speak so highly of him.

3:11:40Ant Pruitt:He was very instrumental in turning Austin into a tech mecca. Joshua Bear, the founder of a small VC firm called Capital Factory, died in a small plane crash. It was an accelerator, really, and it turned Austin into a real tech hub. Very many people I know uh just think the world of him everybody's had very kind things to say so there's a lot of shock in austin after the passing of joshua bear the godfather of austin's startup machine quite tragic he was he was fairly young and then uh another person you might know of you know of his company he's one of the founders of ubisoft claude guillemot uh passed in a another plane crash a couple of plane crashes uh ubisoft i i didn't know this the history of ubisoft is is kind of uh interesting they were a mail order software business and that they transformed he and his brother into one of the world's largest video game companies uh they also made hardware and the guillemore corporation made a lot of uh uh controllers for flight simulators and driving simulators and things like that uh so uh he will be missed claude guillemot passed away in a plane crash a couple of uh immemoriums it's kind of sad to end the show with that i should end it with something more upbeat happy father's day happy longest day of the year longest show of the year at this point i think and uh also it's pride month and that was another great story you had in the San Francisco Business Times.

3:13:30Ant Pruitt:Yes, AI may be big in San Francisco, but let's not forget, it is also a very prideful town. Did they, is the parade, did they already have the parade? No, that's a week from today. Nice. That's always a party in San Francisco. AI? How about gay-eye?

3:13:52Ant Pruitt:Thank you so much, Owen. Great to see you. owen thomas is uh the uh managing editor of the san francisco business times and uh always a welcome hugh and fitz are always a welcome presence on the show thank you for being here we appreciate it thank you for putting up with this marathon i didn't mean to make it a marathon you know what often happens that uh when i get people on i really like we just can't stop talking uh ian thompson also a long time friend of the show great to have you and stumpy the cat uh yes he's been using the litter box during the show much to my discomfort for some reason stumpy just waits until twit and then it's time baby it's time uh great to see you you will find ian's uh view from the valley in fact you could subscribe to where do they go to subscribe to it uh just go to techfinitive.com and um you can log in there yeah absolutely wonderful techfinitive.com look for the view from the valley, our own Ian Thompson.

3:14:55Ant Pruitt:And, of course, Doc Rock. You'll find him walking cockily down the hallways of Ecamm saying, you can't fire me. We don't have any hallways. There's no hallways here. That's in Massachusetts. That's a far, far way away. What do you think we are, Anthropic? He's the director of strategic partnerships there at Ecamm. Thank you, Ecamm, for making this show possible. We appreciate your software. It's great. you'll find them on youtube youtube.com slash doc rock and uh you're rooting for the netherlands huh yeah i just i think they'll finally pull it off you know you know um leo they said the ai is supposed to make these things go by faster somehow you made it made it longer geez geez louise oh my goodness ian who are you rooting for england uh actually i'm rooting for scotland but so i think i'm going to be facing a disappointment on that one um england have got a decent game but i think the netherlands has got a strong chance um we'll see how france plays spain has been a real disappointment so far really good today though yeah five to one today it's it's really netherlands france and argentina are probably the okay that sounds exciting that sounds good and owen do you care you know i i just want people to to come and buy beers and you know and hang out in downtown san francisco for the city yeah yeah it's good for the city thank you everybody for joining us a special thanks to our club twit members who make this show possible make all of our show possibles with their memberships 10 bucks a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows plus access to the club twit discord and all the special programming we do just for you in the club coming up this week.

3:16:41Ant Pruitt:I'm excited about it. Episode... Well, technically it's episode two, but we're going to call it episode three of the great show with Jeff Atwood we call Off by One. Get it? Off by One is... See? It was a little programming humor. Off by One. Let me see what the schedule says. I think it's Friday. Coming up, yes, Friday the 26th at 2 p.m. Pacific, at 5 p.m. Eastern. Choose Your Own Adventure with the wild and woolly Jeff Atwood. That'll be a lot of fun. That's one of many club shows we do. Our AI user group is coming up July 3rd. Micah's Crafting Corner, the 16th. We had a great time with the Media Club.

3:17:26Ant Pruitt:If you're in the club, listen to that recording. That was from last Friday. Day before yesterday, we talked about the movie The Fifth Element. Micah will be doing more of those. I love that movie. But most importantly, the club supports everything we do here if you believe in we're not owned by a big company with the murdochs do not own this if you believe in independent journalism covering big tech without fear or favor your support is really appreciated support all of the all of the podcasts and websites that do that we need independent media covering big tech uh but support us too twit.tv slash club twit.

3:18:04Ant Pruitt:We do twit every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern Time, 2100 UTC. You can watch it in the club, in the Discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. We stream it everywhere after the fact on-demand versions of the show, audio or video available at our website, twit.tv. There's a YouTube channel with the video, great way to share clips with friends and family. And of course, subscribing is the easiest thing to do find your favorite podcast client subscribe leave us a great review too that would help and that way you'll get it automatically as soon as it's available thanks for joining us everybody have a wonderful father's day enjoy the sunlight in the northern hemisphere shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere so you know enjoy the darkness down there and we'll be back next week meanwhile another twit is in the can bye bye hey everybody it's leo laporte you know about MacBreak Weekly, right?

3:18:58Ant Pruitt:You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with Apple, this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inako, Alex, Lindsay, Jason Snell, and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news. It's an easy subscription. Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for MacBreak Weekly or visit our website, twit.tv slash mbw. You don't want to miss a week of MacBreak Weekly.

3:19:26Ant Pruitt:doing the twit, alright doing the twit baby doing the twit, alright