TWiT 1098: Usain Volt - Meta, Addiction, & the Future of Online Engagement

36:27We have a contract that we're about to sign as a company, and we sent it to the lawyer. He said, I'll get back to you in a month. And it's like, no, no, we need, we need. A lot of us were promised that AI would make work easier. I told Lisa, just give it to Superhuman Go. Somewhere along the way, AI just felt like one more thing to manage along with everything else. That's why so many people are turning to Superhuman Go. I love the way this works. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing, doesn't ask you to start from zero, sits right next to your screen, just like Grammarly.

37:07It's the same people who give us Grammarly. So whether you're drafting an email mid-meeting or summarizing a long thread before a call or hunting for a firewall, three tasks deep, you don't have to switch context. That's always how that is when you cross through a door and you forgot what you came for. You don't forget what you're here for. Superhuman Go works seamlessly inside your existing tools to give you the help you need without ever making you lose your place. Lisa took the contract. It was open. It was right on her screen. She asked Superhuman Go, give us what you think. It was so great.

37:42Because Superhuman Go is from the makers of Grammarly, it works across the tools and sites you already use. We use Grammarly like crazy. So it was just a very natural extension of that. It's in your browser. It's in your inbox, your docs, your project tools. It's not intrusive. We're not talking, you know, clippy here. It's just there in the background for when you need it. Put simply, Superhuman Go helps you be the best version of yourself at work without the friction, without that context switching, without the busy work. you have the time and brain space to solve the problems that matter so you can focus on the work only you can do that's the whole promise of this right let let superhuman go do the busy work you'll do the thinking work goes ai chat is available right there on the side of your browser always ready no new tabs no switching apps no losing your place use goes ai chat to draft emails and messages to summarize long threads and documents to search across all your apps without leaving the page you're on because we are big time grammarly users it was just a really natural step for us to go to superhuman go prep for meetings in seconds follow up without starting from scratch liso uses it when she's going to prepare for a sales call it's it's super handy to say okay brief me on this call that's coming up superhuman go keeps up and handles the repetitive stuff so you can move forward.

39:09This is AI that works with you, not on top of you. Check it out. Find out more at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com. Thank you so much for supporting this week in tech. Robert, I know you're a big AI user. I have fallen down the AI well the rabbit hole help me i can't get out uh the new uh pixel 11 we were talking about it comes with ai the new york times asks the question does anyone want that uh there's a new camera mode called magic capture i think that's the biggest uh feature they say google said in the uh trevor noah presentation uh people think uh camera phones deliver too much realism.

40:02They're too accurate. They want something a little more artistic. So, I mean, this to me looks just like Instagram filters, to be honest. It's just filter. I mean, everyone is anxious to call every product they have AI enabled. This is really just machine learning. And it's not particularly innovative machine learning. It's old machine learning from maybe 10 years ago. So is it interesting? Sure. I mean, anytime I can do something local, I would prefer to do it that way rather than in the cloud. And yes, I'm sure some people will be able to use the engine to do some interesting, creative things, but AI so that my photos look better.

40:39No, no, that's no, I'm not going to buy that. If it comes with the phone, great, but that's not a driving feature. Google's putting Gemini everywhere. In fact, Lisa's new car that she just bought has Gemini as the assistant. The, you know, when I set up the Gemini, little Gemini, the new speaker for my ex, Jennifer, she said, I keep getting ads. So I set it up for her. And the first thing it says, do you want the AI assistant? I said no, because I thought it might confuse her a little bit. Your new phone can order groceries. That seems like a recipe for disaster. Hail rides, book restaurant tables.

41:21I have not tried this. As much as I am an AI fanatic, I don't really trust AI to book restaurants for me. They keep trying to feed us that this is going to be Jarvis from Iron Man. And it's not there yet. It really isn't. They really should stop because once they do get a product that's close to an actual virtual assistant, we're not going to believe them. Oh, that's a good point. We're going to say, oh, yeah, we've seen this. I've had too many failures of all these systems. to trust it, to allow it to do anything on its own. You know, whatever, you know, if I'm, you know, if I need to put stuff on the grocery list, I'm going to go in and do that myself.

42:06I'm going to add it to my grocery list. If I want to order a car, I will do that. I will pick up my phone, open up Uber or Lyft or Waymo or Zoox, you know, depending on where I am, and order a car, right? But I'm not going to rely on any of these assistants to do that because too often they get it wrong. They misinterpret where I want to go or what it is I want. And it's just not worth the hassle. It's funny because, like I said, I spend more time with AI than I spend with my wife, to be frank, than any human. And I use it like crazy, but I use it in coding. I use it in sysadmin stuff. It's great for setting up stuff.

42:55For some reason, the more analog things, interacting with humans, self-driving, I'm much more reluctant to use it. I feel like you're right. It's not reliable enough. Why is that, Robert? I trust it to code. I don't trust it to make a book, a reservation. We trust it with things that we can fix at a later time. We don't trust it with things that are making decisions in real time. That's a good point. Real time, yeah. So I can refine the code. It can be refined. We can have process. It takes time. It takes a long time. It takes human AI interaction. I don't trust it to make phone calls for me. A decade ago, I had a fascinating conversation with somebody who was head of automotive at NVIDIA at the time.

43:49And, you know, one of the things he was saying about AI was, you know, AI is going to be great at providing superhuman performance at very specific tasks. But it's probably never going to be able to be really generalized. And I think what we're seeing now is exactly that. It is really good at very specific tasks, like coding. Coding is something where there are boundaries, there's rules, there's constraints around. You can write a chunk of code, test it, know if it works or not. But when there is more nuance to it, things become much more difficult. You've said, Sam, that's where it falls down.

44:38You don't ever see fully autonomous vehicles. Like, there will never be a car that can drive down any city street. I think, you know, what I've said is I don't expect to see what we call level five vehicles. So the SAE levels of automation, the two key ones are level four and level five. Level five means that it's able to drive anywhere under any conditions. You know, anywhere the human can drive, the system can drive. level four means that it can drive without human supervision or intervention within some constraints without within what we call an operational design domain we kind of have level four now my neighbor we absolutely have level four today my neighbor drove up from southern california is actually his brother-in-law drove up from southern california put into his tesla he has a model three or no model y put into his tesla drive me to this destination not only did it do the highway stuff which most cars can do very well now it did the city streets of stop i said it is but that's still a level two system that's only level two level two means that it requires human supervision yes a human has to be ready to take over at any time yeah right but he did that's actually say i don't know how i got here and this is the fundamental flaw with level two you know level two defines you know this this is what it can do but i'm i don't entirely trust level two systems you know as as an engineer worked on active safety systems for many years i don't trust those systems because i know what can go wrong you know level four you know does not require human supervision and even there so you could take a nap they still make mistakes yeah or you there doesn't even have to be anybody in the vehicle it can be it can be you know it can be a that's what we're seeing now with waymos we're seeing that with zooks and waymos yeah You know, they're driving around, you know, going to pick somebody up and there's no one in the vehicle.

46:35So that's level four. That's level four. Yes. And we're seeing it on city streets. We had Dan O'Dowd on Intelligent Machines on Wednesday. He's the guy who ran for Senate in California, not because he wanted to become a senator, but because he wanted to run ads against Tesla. And so people weren't taking the anti-Tesla ads. but once you're a political candidate they have to so you do it as a pack yeah and uh and he ran i remember this it was a couple of years ago he ran these ads showing teslas driving over mannequins sized of child backing over people doing all sorts of stuff he's been he he's an interesting fella he claims that software can be perfectible and he's he's the proof is that he writes his company writes the software for f-35 fighters and the a380 plane he writes software for you know mission critical nasa you know situations where a the the software has to run perfectly cannot have any bugs and b it isn't even can't be maintained easily you know green hill he says that's possible green hill software is an amazing company is that his company green hills green hill software yeah they do they do they make some amazing stuff he was really interesting but i'm not sure by what he's saying and they're you know their their stuff is widely considered to be some of the safest software you can get right uh you know they do a lot of embedded systems yeah they use a lot you know they do a lot of embedded systems software and it works really really well but i you know i agree i i you know and i have a lot of respect for mr o'dowd uh but um and and the work that Green Hills does.

48:21I mean, we've, you know, in the past when I was still an engineer, we looked at using their software. It wasn't the right tool for us. It's very expensive. But, you know, for certain applications, it's really, really good. And, you know, I think, you know, what they've done is taken all of the best practices and taken them, you know, to the nth degree, you know, to try to make the software as safe and secure and reliable and robust as possible. And they've done an amazing job at that. Do I believe that there is no way to ever hack that software or that it'll ever crash? Not entirely. I think it's far less likely to crash, far less likely to be hacked than almost any other human written software.

49:13but i you know i can't say with absolute certainty that it's you know absolutely perfect on a mission i think to stop full self-driving tesla's full self-driving yeah by the way said something interesting he said the waymos are fine he didn't have a he didn't have as much of a problem they're not perfect either you know waymos make mistakes zooks make mistakes they're better than humans though i guess their sensor technology is better than tesla yeah you know their sensor technology always a lot better waymos and zooks vehicles are a lot better than humans within certain driving environments right correct in fact which is the way most off the freeway that's where they that's where they define that's how they define the operational design domain right you know they you know when they when they know it can work as safe or better than humans within within certain constraints that's where they will operate you know there are lots of places where waymos do not operate because they are not confident that it can do better than humans.

50:13And, you know, when you look at the statistics, the crash statistics, you know, half of all traffic fatalities happen on rural roads. You know, half of them involve alcohol. Well, that, you know, the alcohol, getting that out of the picture, you know, obviously, autonomous vehicles don't have that problem. But certainly, half of, you know, half of the fatal crashes happen on rural roads waymos don't operate on those roads you know fatal crashes are a lot less likely in an urban environment in a dense urban environment because for one your speeds tend to be a lot lower so that's you know they are safer again within that constraint right he was uh interesting i feel like he's a little bit got a chip on his shoulder about tesla but you don't disagree you don't disagree i think sam you've said that before yeah you know i i think i think that tesla's approach is fundamentally flawed and i you know i'm glad i was glad to hear him call out you know the fact that you know they are testing you know they're putting beta versions of safety critical software in the hands of untrained consumers that do not know how to evaluate yeah that was his main point yeah that's that's we are all and because we are in the road with Tesla's, we are part of the beta test.

51:33Yeah. I mean, you know, usually. We're the NPCs in the beta test. Usually, you know, if you are going to get involved, say, you know, in experimental medical therapy, you have the concept of informed consent. You are the one that is taking some experimental treatment for cancer. You know, the doctors have to tell you, OK, here's the things that could go wrong. You know, we don't know if this is going to work. We think it can help, but here's the things that might happen. So you have that concept of informed consent for the participant. The problem with what Tesla is doing, and also to, you know, this also applies to Waymo and Zoox and everybody else that's out there, is that all the rest of us on the roads have not consented to be part of this experiment.

52:27You know, pedestrians have not consented to be part of this experiment. And so, you know, we are at the mercy of their testing and what they're doing. And, you know, I think that, you know, Waymo's approach is much, much safer, much more robust. And they are much they have generally shown much less likelihood to get in, you know, get into situations and crashes where, you know, where other road users are going to be negatively impacted than, say, for example, you know, Tesla's. You know, there have been at least 50 crashes with the Tesla robo taxi fleet in Austin since they launched it a year ago.

53:09And, you know, many of those have been the fault of the Tesla vehicles, not, you know, in the vast majority of the cases where there have been crashes with a Waymo vehicle or a Zoox vehicle. It's usually actually been the fault of another human driver that is interacting with that vehicle. But there was just an incident in L.A., I think, about a week or so ago, kind of similar to what happened with Cruz in San Francisco, where a pedestrian was struck by a human-driven vehicle and knocked into the path of a Waymo. And the Waymo saw the pedestrian and hit the brakes and slowed down. We don't have all the details yet about exactly when it detected and when it slowed down.

53:56But by the time that the pedestrian was knocked into the path or actually into the side of the Waymo, the vehicle, I think, was down to about five or six miles an hour. So, you know, that was more of a problem, though, because Waymo kind of covered it up. Yeah, that's yeah, that's that's and that's an issue. That's one of the things that needs to be addressed with for all of these companies is we need to have some rules, mandatory data disclosure. And one thing. My sense is way most better about that than Tesla, though. Oh, yeah. Since 2023 or 2022, NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, issued a standing general order that any vehicle that is operating at level two or above that is involved in a crash, the company has to submit the data about that crash to NHTSA.

54:51And there's a database that you can download that's got all this crash data. And there's a lot of really interesting data in there, except for Tesla. Tesla submits all their data, but for reasons that we can only speculate about, NHTSA has allowed Tesla to redact most of the data from the publicly available database. So you go in there, you see, oh, there was a crash at this location on this date. And that's literally it. Everything else Tesla is declaring as company proprietary information. And so we don't really know what has happened in most of these crashes. I mean, that's what I want to see.

55:30I want to say if you're going to be testing on public streets, if you're going to be testing with our safety, you don't get you don't get proprietary information anymore. Yeah. Everything has to be public information. Yes, absolutely. so waymo uh so one of the things i'm kind of excited about is new looks for some of these self-driving vehicles uh we talked earlier before the show about zooks which is now uh able to accept paying uh riders in vegas did you have you ridden in zooks i've done it about a dozen times it's actually it works really well really i'm really intrigued by them because they don't have a dry steering wheel they don't have a front seat it's it's living room style they call like campfire style seating.

56:13It's set up so that when my Zooks pulls up, it changes to my color mode so that I know that that's my Zooks. That's something they added recently, by the way. How do they do that? What do you mean? The car changes color? No, there's LED light strips in the windows. So you know what color you're looking for and that's your Zooks? So like I was at a DEF CON and five Zooks would pull up and you're like, well, which one is mine? You don't want to look at the license plate for each one, but you had your own color scheme. So you just look for the color scheme. The Vegas airport at the Uber stand has a big sign saying, make sure your driver knows your name and you ask his name.

56:49Make sure you get in the because people, I guess, are picking up the wrong people or posing as Uber drivers. I don't know. Yeah, it's all in the same area. You can't really pose as a Zooks. People just getting in the wrong vehicle, things like that. Zooks, there's no driver, so there's nobody to say your name. So I think you have to do something. When I get into the car. Oh, sorry, guy. I was just going to say, when I went for a ride with Zoox in January during CES, I was out in the pickup area at the Luxor, and there were five or six Zoox vehicles that pulled in at the same time, and all they had was a little number on the back corner.

57:26And you had to go up and look at each one to figure out which one is yours. And I talked to Zoox about this afterwards. I gave them some feedback on my experience. and one of the things they've added since then is these LED light strips. So in the app, it shows you the color that's going to be on your car, so you'll see these various LED lights. And the other cool thing about the vehicle is that it has no front or back. It's completely symmetrical. It goes either way. Yeah. In fact, it changes. Like the headlights turn into the taillights, and the taillights turn into the headlights. Yeah, you just go from white to red or vice versa.

58:00And in the same ride, would it switch directions? It can. And depending on if it needs to maneuver somewhere, if it doesn't have space to maneuver, it can just back up and go back the opposite direction. It's got all the same sensors on all four corners. So it's got the same sensor pods at all four corners. And everything is completely redundant. So there's a motor on each axle. So at the two ends of the vehicle, you have the exact same drive unit, suspension, brakes, steering system. It's completely interchangeable. Uh, so, you know, this gets shipped to them from their supplier as a, as a module.

58:38They just bolted up to the body. Uh, so if steering fails on one axle, you still have it on the other axle. If drive fails on one axle, you still have it on the other axle. Same with brakes and the air conditioning and the compute, some, you know, uh, redundant compute, everything is all completely redundant. This seems like a good idea. Like, so the Waymos were Jaguar I-Paces. Uh, in fact, Waymos started to order now some, they still have a front seat and a back seat. seat so they're still kind of car like but they've ordered some new they call it the oh hi which is a play on a town in southern california and oh hi yeah yeah it's a little it's a little minivan made by a company called ziker uh which is part of gili okay yeah yeah it's it's chinese yeah i want to try one of the zooks wheelchair accessible vehicles because they do have vehicles you can specify wheelchair and it will be like a minivan it's that has a ramp down so so those um are not autonomous so what they will do is they will send you uh a wheelchair accessible you know if you request a wheelchair accessible vehicle they'll send you a human driven vehicle with wheelchair access it makes sense at some point they will i'm sure they will have an accessible version of the robo-taxi because back before cruise went kaput um you know the cruise they had the cruise origin which like the the the uh zooks was a purpose-built robo-taxi it had this coach seating or campfire seating um and uh you know they had they had prototypes that had um wheelchair ramps built into the floor so when you know if you requested one with uh with a wheelchair for a wheelchair.

1:00:18You know, it would pull up, the sliding doors would open up, the ramp would emerge out from the floor, you roll in, and then one of the positions, they'd have no seats in there, they'd have anchors for the wheelchair.

1:00:32Nice. And you like it, Leo. When you get in there, everything is controlled via your phone or the control panel. Your Bluetooth delivered music starts playing over the speaker systems. And it tells you exactly how many rides you've done, where you're going, how much energy it's going to take. It's kind of a geek ride. you it's a little it's kind of fun yeah there's a cup holder a wireless charging pad a touch screen for each of the four seating positions uh so you can pair your phone um you can put it down on the wireless charging pad so zooks right now is only vegas right is it gonna no they they are doing they've got their early riders pro early rider program in san francisco and austin right now uh and they want my other cities yeah why do they so why do these self-driving cars start in san francisco which seems to me like that's second only to boston as the worst possible place you can be a self-direct that's exactly why yeah it's a very challenging environment okay if you can drive there you can drive anywhere yeah exactly okay if you can make it work reliably in san francisco chances are it's going to work fine in in phoenix seems easy it's been wide streets they're straight same with las vegas yeah vegas has a different challenge it has to be able to identify drunk people drunk people do things that they shouldn't do yeah you know in vegas nobody's ever moving fast enough on the strip except during exactly and pre-weekend you know that it's not that much of a problem but one thing i did appreciate is uh at one point i was going from resorts world to area 51 across the the freeway and it was a big traffic jam and so i'm i'm kind of visiting the ufos what were you doing oh no it's the uh the shopping center the oh it's called It's not actually Area 51.

1:02:14Oh, not Area 51. Area 15, right? Okay. There's a difference. I think so, yeah. It's a play on Area 51. Area 51 is a little further north. Yeah, yeah. No, but it started like turning my music up in the last five minutes because it figured I had fallen asleep. And I'm like, oh, hey, cool. Well, again, this is something that people should be aware of. If you're going to be riding in a robo-taxi, there are sensors. There's cameras. There's smoke detectors. and they can detect damage in the cabin yeah you know i mean if somebody gets sick um you know falls asleep has a heart attack uh you know they want to be able to detect that um and you know so they you're being watched you're being recorded all the time it's very upfront about that that's in the app yeah it says you are being recorded while you were in the vehicle yeah and you know if you leave something behind you know then they want to be able to detect that send it back to the depot um so they can take that out or if the vehicle needs to be cleaned you know whatever it might be uh pausing we'll talk more about vehicles and other things in just a bit with sam abul samet our car my car guy and that's father robert palisare i i threw benito a little curve and started with you sam the digital jesuit great to have you both on the show actually great to have a brand new sponsor.

1:03:33I'm really excited. This Week in Tech brought to you this week by Claude, or as Paul Therott calls him, Claude. I am a Claude fan. I have said this many times on our Intelligent Machines show. My world changed November 24th, 2025, last November, when Opus four or five came out i was using claude code and i was blown away claude is built by anthropic you know the name a public benefit corporation uh and it is absolutely my go-to for the hardest problems in ai i use a variety of ai models some of them local some of them in the cloud but when when i need the best i always turn to claude and there's nothing like the claude code harness claude is the AI for problem solvers.

1:04:29It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. And I've been using Claude pretty much nonstop and religiously. I have a Claude Max subscription, which I just, I love because I get to use Claude whenever I need frontier quality brains. If you're a developer losing your day to tasks you want to hand off, including, as I mentioned, simple things like system administration. When a server is down, a Docker container is not launching, when my screen isn't blanking, I say, I launch Claude code and i say fix it and it fixes it you get your choice of models fable for the really tough stuff this is i don't think there's anything comes even close to fable it's the highest intelligence i can use opus 5 for when i want to do some coding is great in fact i use the two of them together i have fable plan i have opus 5 code cloud code lives where you already work you can use it in your terminal you can use it in your ide you can use the desktop app you can use web you can use github i've used them all it reads your code base it's kind of amazing seeing it work and go yeah i get it what do you want to do takes on real engineering work you can use it to write tests effect that's part of my claude uh setup is i say test driven design write the tests first i do red green and it's so good at that.

1:06:10Write the test first. It's great at refactoring. In fact, I'm doing that right now. I'm using Fable. I used Fable to redesign our Twit sales system, which is a huge MySQL system written in 2012. I pointed it at it. I said, here's the database. Here's the code. It rewrote 81 ,000 lines of Go code beautifully, beautifully. And it's doing the debugging. it wrote the tests the it's there's it's amazing such great tests even watching pull requests fixing ci failures while you're away it's so good i'll never forget uh one of the first programs i wrote with claude uh i think this is opus 4 8 probably i wrote an rss reader and uh it pushed it to github it even invoked cicl it said okay i've built versions for mac windows and linux which one do you want?

1:07:04And I went, you did what? I said, wow, lay out what you want. Or if you're using Cloud Code or one of the Cloud Cowork apps, you just hold the space bar, talk it through, and Cloud executes. It's a very natural way to work. Cloud Cowork is amazing. That is the desktop app that can handle recurring tasks for you. Things like scanning Slack and email, create a prioritized action lists so nothing slips through the cracks and deep research we use that all the time to research people it does the best show prep i've ever had i wish i'd had this my whole career to research companies who want to advertise it can pull together and does detailed cited analysis from dozens of sources claw design is how i design my website it lets you quickly explore and build out ideas, while the new Reflect beta gives you a look at how you're actually using Claude and encourages you to step back and decide what you still want to do yourself.

1:08:05I just, I mean, these guys, there's some secret sauce at Anthropic. It's kind of amazing. Claude Fable, which is Anthropic's most intelligent model to date, is built to carry a long, complicated project end-to-end instead of needing it broken up into separate tasks. It can one-shot the most amazing things. That's why companies like Stripe and Shopify and Pfizer and Rakuten and Notion all trust Anthropic to roll out AI in their businesses. It's why we're using Claude to rewrite our entire business workflow. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at Claude.ai slash technology. That's Claude.ai slash technology.

1:08:45And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai slash technology. I bet you use a little bit of fable in your life, Mr. Robert, Father Robert. I do. This is my AI. There are many like it, but this one is mine. This one is mine. I say that all the time. And it's funny because I started in Claude Code. That's what I use for months and months and months. I use a Gentix framework called Harness, a harness called Hermes. but honestly every time i go back to claude code which i do daily i'm kind of blown away by it just knows all it's gotten a lot better it's so much faster than its competitors i don't so leo i gotta ask you are you now okay with claude's fingerprinting um not a fan not i look i understand they they're doing it because the eu is making them do it yeah and uh and i understand that i am a i am a fan of in fact i think google took the wrong uh approach google's been doing this for years right they call it synth id and the idea is that you can identify something that's created by ai and i really like it that they put it on images and video like they put a watermark so that if you see a deep fake you know it's a deep fake and then google stopped doing that they said we're going to have a hidden uh synth id but we're not going to have a visible watermark it's like no that's the absolute wrong direction and i feel the same way with anthropics watermarking if you're going to do it make it visible make it easy for people to see it i don't and that's the approach they're taking you know kind of is kind of the opposite they can't really do that with the the type of solution that they've come up they feel like if they do that people will reverse engineer it which of course they're going to do anyway and uh and strip it out because there are people who really don't want you to know they're using ai to make deep fakes and things like that and i do think that's problematic i understand that what anthropic did is because they were required to by the eu and by the way it's not just anthropic everybody now is doing that um i wish it were more visible but i also understand why they're reluctant to do that because the bad guys are ingenious and uh yeah so yeah i'm not a fan of watermarking i'm not uh as far as i can tell it's it's as invisible as you can make it um but that's kind of i want to be visible can a visible watermark be backwards engineered absolutely 100 however what it would stop is a lot of the very low effort ai slop that has been just clogging up our feeds yeah so i'm okay with that love getting ready and you know what i think if people saw you know made by claude in the lower right hand corner or the upper right that would be a good thing i'd have no problem with that i think that's that's what you really want and i think and content creators would learn how to use it because even if you're if you're legitimately using ai to to help tell a story it shouldn't matter whether or not it's ai or not the only ones who really don't want you to know are those who are they're either trying to spread disinformation or it's an automated system where they're taking stories off of reddit and right and trying to create them yeah exactly and i don't want either of those those are not just annoying they're harmful yeah yeah um i maybe put it in the metadata that would be okay with me you just you need a way to check it the problem right now the problem is for it to be useful it needs to be persistent and the metadata can be manipulated there's there isn't really a very good solution for this yeah that's really the real problem EU has mandated something impossible Anthropic is working with camera manufacturers to build that technology in so basically you can register original content so if there's ever a question about whether or not it's AI or real you can say no no it's in the register you know the original source except with my like a digital camera is is anything ever really real you know well no that's kind of the point too is you know there's you know the neil is real what's real is a painting real what's real is this video you're looking at real what's real uh we had this exact conversation 10 years ago when you were talking about photography i have a like it's not actually my office behind me i'm not sitting in my office you're not it's green screen i have an m11p that has content credentials in it it's turned on uh so if you get if you look at a picture of mine you can check it there are websites you can run it through that says you know this is original it was taken with this camera by leo i think that's a good thing i i don't have a problem with any of that in fact i almost prefer it went that direction where real stuff was was validated as opposed to unreal stuff uh all of the cameras in my shop do that and for a very specific reason because we represent someone who we need to be able to prove authenticity so yeah now that shroud of torrent thing did you no i'm just kidding just kidding if they'd had that we would know right no but no no what you don't understand leo is that the shroud of torrent is on the blockchain okay so it's real it is real all right um leo before before you go on what is the topic what is the status of the shroud of turn real or not real where do we stand today you know it's real it's it is a real cloth there is something on the cloth that is it is it what is just his image question is has it has is it what it was what it is purported to be exactly that's the question is there something on the shroud turn yes does it exist yes are there people who saying that it's the face of christ yes i cannot prove that it's that is a matter of faith i have to say when i went to jerusalem which was an amazing experience we did you know we went to all of the you know canonical sites golgotha and the stone and so forth and you know there is a church built around jesus's tomb and there's a shrine there can they prove that was jesus's tomb absolutely not because it was so long ago and there's no historical proof but i'll tell you what is real the people who are there who are deeply devout who are believing and for them it is it is a very powerful experience and that you feel the vibe there and i think that's real yeah that's palpable it's different and it's like the uh the shards of the real cross of christ that used to be the big thing it's like if you gathered all the shards of the real cross of christ you could solve the homeless population because that'd be enough wood to build millions of the size of the empire state building yeah no that's but but that's not really the point is it it uh there's a zen saying uh that you don't want to focus when when you have a finger pointing at the moon the wise man looks at the moon not at the finger the less wise man is focused on the finger it isn't about the finger it's about the moon don't focus on the finger or you miss all that heavenly glory.

1:15:58I'm glad he did that. I didn't say it. Leo, before you go on to another topic, there is one other thing I wanted to address on the AV topic. Oh, yes, please. Which is something that Dan O'Dowd did not talk about is what is actually probably one of the biggest potential software issues is the back-end systems. For a robo-taxi to work or even a personally owned AV, You know, there has to be some back end systems. It has to be connected somewhere. You know, if you're going to have a car that is going to go park itself, if it's your own personal vehicle or if it's a robo taxi or an automated truck, there has to be back end systems that communicate with that vehicle to tell it where to go to retrieve the vehicle, you know, to dispatch it.

1:16:49And those are actually probably the most likely to have security vulnerabilities. You know, this is one of the problems with security is you've got the entire value chain where there are potentials for security vulnerabilities to be introduced. Because not everything is done in-house. You've got different vendors that are producing different elements of this. You've got tools that could be corrupted. And so the, you know, the back end systems that manage these vehicles are another part that, you know, we really need to take a look at, you know, to make sure they are also secure, not just the function of the vehicle.

1:17:33It's one thing to make a vehicle that you can tell it, you know, OK, go to this location and it will drive itself through some environment and get there. But then, like I said, you have to have some cloud infrastructure that actually manages all that. That's kind of scary. So if the internet goes down, now those cars are connected to the cloud via cellular? Yeah. Must be, right? And this is one of the issues that, in fact, we've seen with Waymo and with Cruise. I'm sure you've seen the stories of there's been 15 Waymo vehicles. Yeah, yeah. Stuck on this block and blocking all the traffic. Yeah, during that power outage last fall.

1:18:18That's exactly what happened. You lost cellular connectivity in that area. And because those vehicles, at least right now, are required to be monitored all the time, they have to have connectivity to their back-end systems. When they lose connection to their control center, they're not being driven remotely. but when they lose connectivity to their control center, they are supposed to pull over to a safe spot and stop and wait until connectivity is restored. And that, you know, if you lose that connectivity, you know, whether it's through a power outage or, you know, whatever else might happen, just, you know, the cell network goes down.

1:19:03And usually these things have redundant cellular connections. They'll have multiple connections. But still, if that goes away, then, you know, at best, the vehicle can continue on to whatever its last destination was set as. It should be able to do that because the actual control of the vehicle is handled locally and the vehicle, that's not being done in the cloud. So, you know, sensing, you know, the perception systems and telling it, you know, you know, what's what's around the vehicle and and the maps and, you know, how to get from one point A to point B. All of that's done locally, but all of the management stuff is done remotely.

1:19:45Yeah. Wow. I had no idea. At least it won't run and run off the side of the road. It'll still drive. It fails safe, which is that's good. Right. Well, actually, what we want. Actually, it's supposed to be fail operational. So there's a distinction. There's fail safe and fail operational. Fail safe means that the system has to be able to detect something has gone wrong and provide an alert to the operator and the operator takes over. That's what we've had traditionally with driver assist systems in cars like anti-lock brakes or electric power steering systems, whatever else. It fails safe. These things have to be fail operational.

1:20:20So if something goes wrong, there has to be a backup system that continues to safely operate the vehicle until at the very least it can get to what we call a minimum risk condition to, you know, basically come to a stop in a safe location. And so that's why you need all this redundancy of different types of sensors, multiple compute platforms, multiple, multiple braking systems, because you don't have that human behind the wheel that, you know, if your, if your ABS fails, or your, even your, your power brake assist, or your power steering assist fails, The human can still operate the vehicle. You might have to turn harder on the steering wheel to steer it, but you can still do that.

1:21:01You can still bring the vehicle to a stop. But when it's all being done electronically, then you need a secondary system that can still stop the vehicle, can still steer the vehicle. That's why, like what I was describing earlier with the Zoox, where having all that redundancy of steering, braking, propulsion, and sensing is essential for these types of vehicles. Interesting. Well, that's a little cautionary tale.

1:21:30I remember the years of yelling throughout the house, I'm on the Internet. Stay off the phone. This is why I drive a 36 year old car that has no connectivity. No driver. Yeah, no, I get it. Let's talk about Apple. We were talking about the EU. They've made a deal with the EU. remember the european commission didn't like it that apple was charging 30 they wanted to negotiate that down boy they sure got a break it's 26 percent uh and okay well john gruber writing in the daring fireball blog said it's a total near total victory for apple uh the main commission drops if if if you uh if you're an app in the app store using the apple payment system the commission drops from 30 to 26 percent uh and all apps still have to pay a five percent core technology commission even if they're outside the app store so apple gets a little little vig no matter where you're buying your app from now Now, the point that's made, and I think the EU makes this point, I've made this point, is the people who pay for these commissions and fees by Apple aren't really the developer so much as you.

1:22:49You know, when I subscribed to Claude Max, it's 200 bucks if I go directly through Anthropic. I can't remember. I think it was 248 bucks if I went through Apple. And for the longest time, I thought that's how much it cost. until I wised up and realized 48 bucks of that was going to Apple. And so that's the, actually, really only 40 bucks, but I guess, no, maybe, no, I don't know. Maybe sales tax, California sales tax. Math is hard. Anyway, I don't know if there's, they don't charge sales tax. Maybe they do, I don't know. I mean, they're probably taking a little bit of a hit because they don't want to transfer the entire thing to the customer.

1:23:28Because 30 % of 200 would be 60 bucks. so they're taking a little bit some of it's taken by anthropic but some of it's taken by me and that's the point of these fees is really it ends up costing the consumer more um it's an interesting breakdown that the eu came up with this number uh but ultimately i think it's a it's a it's it's the best thing that could have happened from apple's point of view now they have to negotiate the same thing in the united states uh we shall see epic of course wants apple to give up a lot more well that 26 is for apps that use apple in-app payments right if you're using some other payment system then the fees are lower right so there's that five percent core technology commission the uh apple store distribution this is how the eu calculated 10 of the app revenue the implied value of the in-app payment api is five percent the implied value of an in-app purchase using apple's payment processing six percent which is roughly what a credit card costs so that makes sense uh that's where that number came came up with and yes uh i don't know what the cost would be if you use a third-party store you i think it's just the five percent core technology commission that apple takes yeah which is not unfair uh i think i mean i mean you're on apple's platform what are you getting what are you getting for that what's what's the value add by going through the apple store i mean aside from yes you're on the platform yes you have access to an audience you get to be in the uh apple ecosystem but i think you're right if you're looking at anthropic or netflix or kindle amazon's kindle books it's kind of rent seeking like Like, here's your 5 % fee.

1:25:19Being in the app store and using in-app purchases, Apple in-app purchases. That's different. It's the lowest friction path. Yeah. And you should pay for that. For the rest, you're right. There is no, you aren't really getting any benefit. Really, I think that the way this should have been done is that for anything outside of the app store or outside of Apple's in-app purchases, what they should do is Apple should just go back to charging some fee for developers to, you know, to use Xcode or, you know, other, you know, to use their tool. They make that free. And then get nothing from the apps. Well, they do get a$99 a year developer fee, which is nothing.

1:25:58I mean, that's pretty low. Yeah. I mean, you know, maybe that should be a little bit higher. And then nothing for, you know, nothing from the apps because they really are not contributing anything. Well, here's the example. So you're Netflix. Let's say you have a Netflix app on the iPhone and people want to subscribe to Netflix. They do it through the app. They do it through Netflix payment processing, Stripe or whatever. Netflix is going to pay 6 % to Stripe, but that's, you know, it's a credit card. But why should Apple get anything? They shouldn't. But they're going to be the opposite of Alex Lindsay.

1:26:35I don't agree that Apple should get a dime for that. it's rent seeking they've already yeah they've already made their profit on selling you the device right and and all the subscriptions nowadays that apple yeah yeah so anyway the eu i think basically gave in and said okay you know you're going to give us a little break thank you we'll take it i don't know i mean american the logic that they're using is that you know they are giving developers access to to an audience but we know from the early days of smartphones that those smartphones that didn't have an, that did not have content, did not have apps died.

1:27:11You know, look at, look at Microsoft and it's Metro, look at all of its, its efforts to do a mobile operating system. So yes, you do get access to a marketplace that you wouldn't have access to otherwise, but also that marketplace would be useless without you. I hate these situations where they've forgotten them something yeah exactly yeah you were paying to give them content yeah and and by giving them that content you're making that device that platform more appealing to customers so they are more likely to buy your phones so you're going to make more profit you couldn't get netflix on an apple device that would be bad for apple yeah i mean it'd be bad for netflix too but that's the point it's a mutual thing right yeah see okay so five percent maybe that's a little bit much anyway we'll we'll watch with interest because as you know what's going on right now is apple has to bring a proposal back to judge yvonne gonzalez rogers she's busy uh you know who rejected their initial proposal of i think it was 27 and said no no you guys you got to give me something better so 25 okay 25 last offer the thinking is maybe apple will go as low as 15 but we'll see and And remember, there is a cut if you are sub Netflix, for instance, and you have regular after a year and so forth.

1:28:31But it's still going to be at least 5%. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what Judge Gonzalez Rogers says, because she has been very clear. She spanked Apple. She said, you lied to me. She actually said Apple's in contempt of court because you lied to me. And so she's been very harsh with them. So we'll see. anyway judges really don't like being lied to that's a that's kind of funny how that works yeah pro tip don't lie and don't you know don't use ai to create your your violence apple by the way did uh lay off some people uh this week in an area that i'm guess i'm not too surprised uh 100 100 people off the vision pro group and 100 people from siri more than 200 jobs i did immediately text alex lindsey said no that's not me i'm in a different division i said oh that's a relief um the cuts according to bloomberg mark german at bloomberg include largely shutting down the vision pro gaming team well that's i mean is there a vision pro gaming is there a game there are no games and reducing the size of the team that makes vision pro immersive content that's a little more concerning because honestly maybe it's just me what do you have without that unless yeah that's the thing you get a vision unless they have you know done deals with creators uh well they have that camera now the black magic camera so yeah yeah but i mean and maybe you know maybe that's part of what alex is doing you know is working with outside he is he's developing relations yeah not just for immersive to get up to get third parties to create that content so that apple doesn't have to do it he may have more of a job yeah yeah uh so i don't know if this is this bad news for the vision pro is it is it kind of is the writing on the wall let me put it this way leo do you remember maybe six eight months ago i told you about the vision pro that i found in saint peter's someone had left it behind and i turned it into the lost and found it's still there oh so it's it was so i mean whoever lost it they're like yeah whatever no it's not a a sticky device that's so bizarre so the whole thing the$3 ,500 face computer in its case in its case oh so they were carrying it around they were carrying it around they were for some reason i guess they were using it in saint peter's they left it on a bench and this wandered away i turned it into lost fun it's still there maybe they didn't know where they left it that's that's possible but i mean there's the assumption if you left something in rome that you're never going to see it again you can you can find it right there's a finding app for for the last time you find my find my vision pro that's a good time they should know exactly where it is they should know exactly the battery is only good for two hours and you know yeah but it will remember where the last place it saw it and i presume there's a lot of iphone users wandering through saint peter's so it knows where the last place it was so they i first thing i do is i call the i didn't know there was a vatican lost and found what else is in there do you go and check every once in a while Oh, absolutely.

1:31:37It's in the, so the Swiss Guard have an office near the West Gate. I'm just checking to see if the Vision Pro is still there. No, because you can go, because they sell things with like Swiss Guard hats and sweaters and key chains and stuff. And so as long as you're wandering through, you go, hey, does that Vision Pro that I turned on, is that still there? Oh yeah, it's sitting on the shelf. That's hysterical. Oh, did you actually find it and turn it in? I did. Yeah, it was me. You're a very honest man, as I would expect. mean i i sell let me ask you though do they sell this in the swiss guard merchandise store they should i'm holding up so my friend jeff atwood who does a club show with us called off by one because he is definitely off uh made these for me oh i love it it's a bust with my head on it and you're in a toga and he decided if he was gonna do that he got my favorite t-shirts which are the comfort colors i really like them although they're somewhat ruined by the bust of me on the front uh he said i just ended up getting i didn't know which color so i got you all of them so i have like a hundred of these a hundred of these i don't know what i'm gonna do with them all give them away on uh club twit give them away i think i will have to have a giveaway but that means i'll have to put them in envelopes and mail them i guess i can do that i know we should we should have club club members would you do you want a bust of leo on your t-shirt wait until the next time you have stamps.com as a sponsor and then you can have them serve it out for you every color of the rainbow everybody that comes to the house to visit you know comes that's basically you get everybody who visits our house gets a copy of salt hank's cookbook and a t-shirt of me it's like it's like when people come here you know anybody that leaves the house has to leave with a water bottle that i've gotten from somewhere over the you know from some from some media program you know like you know this you know i've got here you know one oh that's nice a mustang mustang yeah so sweet you know and my wife has warned me not to bring home any more water bottles i'm that way anyone anyone who visits me in rome will go home with an indulgence so i mean is the gate still open or no no no the gates the gates are long closed long closed sorry did you know about that sam the jubilee gate it was open you can walk through it all your sins are washed away 25 years every 25 years yeah which by the way leo years this is the very first time in the history of the catholic church that the doors were opened by one pope and closed by another oh it's never ever happened before which is kind of weird yeah that is odd huh how are we are we liking pope leo i'm liking him i think yes we talked about the encyclical the ai encyclical which i thought was very thoughtful yes uh and actually the funny thing about the ai encyclical is that i have been getting so many contacts from journalists that everybody thinks you wrote it that's why which is weird i know no but you know i can comment on it but the question i get asked more often than any other is why does leo hate ai so much i'm like did you you didn't actually read the document no he didn't that's why i liked it he specifically celebrated it he said yes there's there's cause for concern and there's ways that it can be abused but it is a product of human imagination of course it's a good thing yeah of course yeah yeah i mean there's absolutely a lot of extremely legitimate use cases for for ai you know and i think there's also a lot of use cases that are very bad yeah we were talking about that don't call restaurants with your ai which by the way leo just just fyi i did put your name because they had requested people for future forums on uh on ai i'd love to go so oh i'll be there if you hear from someone that's where it came from i will I will go there with my, with bells on and I will wear my t-shirt.

1:35:49I think that's a, it's not a Buonarroti, but it's pretty close. Actually, if you wanted Leo to take that, what you would do is you would add the lettering for Villanova. He goes crazy. Anyone wearing a Villanova hat. Yeah. He graduated from there. He graduated from Villanova. I'm holding this up so it can be the thumbnail for this episode. The new merch. The new merch. no you know what that's a good idea i'll ask jeff what he wants to do he's the one who bought them and sent them to me but i bet you he'll want to give it away maybe we'll do a a charity thing take donations for charity and we'll send them out to uh to club members something like that i think that's a good idea first set up a booth at the sonoma county fair you know twit booth you know hand out t-shirts get your busts here you bust a leo get your busts i might have a few bobbleheads too in the back room and homemade jam yes speaking of uh find my uh very interesting uh kind of detective work by 404 media they had been approached by rare booksellers who said we don't know but somebody's buying a bunch of rare books and we think it might be going to ais for training can you help us and 404 said yeah we're going to place an air tag in the spine of it and the air tag revealed that those rare books at least in that case were going to an amazon ai training facility in your neighborhood in las vegas i know exactly where it is and the team there by the way the logo uh for the team is of an alligator devouring books the team there uh not a good sign yeah tears the books the paper from their spine scans it and then destroys the books this is is that an alligator no that's it is that's a dinosaur it's something that's chomping yeah it's a raptor so they definitely take pride in their work now i i i'm probably on the wrong side of the law here but i said so what big deal nobody these are old books nobody wants them they're going to end up in a dump somewhere at least they're going to end up in ai helping us all get better ai right i mean they're going for books that are out of copyright protection that's right so they don't have ai content so they're training on real human content and so jeff jarvis said what are you crazy these are rare books they're they're scholars want these books well scholars should go get the books the reason they have to destroy them by the way i pointed out is because the court says if you don't it's it's it's not fair use the publishers don't want those books to go back on the market so the publishers are happy if the books are destroyed they do have to take them apart to scan them efficiently you know you can't they have to cut off these are old you know out of print books the publishers aren't going to get any benefit from the resale of these books anyway well that's the point they don't want they want you to buy a new one for it to be fair use it has to be transformative and transforming it from a text to electronic is transformative so that's this was the anthropic case where the judge said it's fine that anthropic bought these books destroyed them that's fair use but when anthropic used a pirate database of digitized books that was illegal and then anthropic had to pay i think one and a half billion dollars to authors for doing that so the judge basically doing what the courts told them to do yeah i mean i personally i i think rare books have to be treasured i think that they're you know they're going to they're going to last longer than any electronic copy of anything but legally they're not doing anything wrong they're they're purchasing it at fair market value and it's not under copyright protection so they can ingest it into their ai training systems and they're destroying it to be in compliance with the law.

1:39:53So if you don't like what they're doing, either buy the copy first or change the law. Yeah. In July, this is from 404, one bookseller told 404 they received a very large order of a thousand books. This is on Biblio, a rare book marketplace. By the way, the use of the word rare implies that they're actually valuable. They may just, I mean, my books are probably rare too, but they're not valuable. I've got a lot of rare books that are only rare because no one read them. Yeah. And then I've got rare books that, no, no, they're generally treasures. And they are kept in an archive. And we would never sell them to Amazon or Anthropica.

1:40:31No, the Vatican Library is world famous for doing that, right? Exactly. Hi, Leo. This is Benito. So there's also books out there that no one knows that they're valuable until 100 years later. And if those get destroyed now, we won't know in 100 years if that book is going to be useful to us or not. which is why there are copies of three of brian brushwood's books in the vatican library no that someone may have scam school there's a copy of scam school in the vatican library there is there is i did that eight years ago that's just funny wow some some poor monk in 150 years is going to come across that what is this very puzzled that's really funny did brian know that i'm not sure i just did it for for giggles i'm like yeah you know i've got a book you could add why not it is a hoot along with a copy of the anarchist cookbook by the way well that belongs there i think that's a historical document that is historical yeah absolutely um amazon is uh you might have something to say about this one sam amazon is aiming for delivery drones to reach 500 u.s neighborhoods by the end of the year can i specify that it gets dropped in my pool because i did you see the video i was just going to bring up that video there's a very funny video of a woman who was so excited because her amazon delivery was coming via drone so she whoops at her phone this is great and it drops it in the hot tub

1:42:07oh dear amazon is going to launch prime air that's what they're calling it delivery drone service in chicago cleveland atlanta syracuse boise idaho more to come at the end of the year uh if you if i guess every primary site so you have to go to the i guess maybe it's a checkbox I don't know, offers delivery drone service within an area of 175 square miles. Wow. The drone's going to fly a long way. Delivery times range. And this is the thing that kind of bugs me. And this is an example of, just like Instagram, consumer demand, companies giving consumers what they want. But is it a good idea? Delivery times range from half an hour to an hour.

1:42:54i gotta have that xbox in half an hour yeah you really don't yeah i mean most most of the stuff they're going to be delivering people don't need in half an hour um i mean there there are absolutely legitimate use cases for this like delivering medicines you know um that that makes sense yeah i mean i saw the movie balto right where the they strap the medicine to the husky who goes through the wilds of Alaska and delivers the medicine and the child is saved. Yeah. You know, somebody, you know, somebody, somebody needs some medication, needs some prescription medication. Right. And, you know, for whatever reason, you know, they're not able to get into a car and drive to a pharmacy or, you know, maybe they live in a rural area, you know, it's 175 mile radius.

1:43:44They live in a rural area and it's not, not practical for them to get to a pharmacy, especially if they're sick and they're alone and they live alone. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are absolutely legitimate use cases for this, but I think probably 99.9 % of the crap that's going to be delivered by these drones. My SIGs. Could have waited until the next day. I need my SIGs. I need my front looks. So these are going to be operating in the same space that Flock is operating its fleet of drones. So you've got two companies that want to flood the air with drones just above the non-regulated space.

1:44:19at some point there's going to be a collision because Albert in our YouTube chat says how long before they start shooting them out of the sky people just and I don't know about these particular drones that Amazon's using but up till now they have somebody just popped, Darren Oki just popped up another picture in the chat Darren is trouble this is in our Discord chat If these things are as noisy as most drones - Oh, you guys look good in those t-shirts. That's good. I don't want these things buzzing around over my house all day long. You realize you guys are wearing each other, right? You realize you're wearing each other.

1:45:00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Robert's wearing me. I'm wearing Sam. Sam's wearing Robert. Yeah. That's a little disturbing. I like it, but that's disturbing. AI, is there anything it can't do? By the way, I didn't know this, but Walmart's been using drone delivery. Walmart has celebrated a milestone. They have more than one million drone deliveries, 66 stores in four states. They want to expand that to 270 stores by next year. The sky's got to be full of delivery drones. Walmart has a more difficult path to it, though, because before every delivery, they have another drone that carries an old greeter that says hello, and then it drops off the box.

1:45:45and yeah stand by keep the pool cover open we got a delivery for you also the side effect yeah i mean you're sorry the side effect of all the buzzing you're going to hear drones all day every day oh yeah that is just like if you're living next to a data center yeah exactly it is a noisy world you know to what you said robert you know these things are flying in you know what is currently unregulated space, you know, below 400 feet. And, you know, unless these things, you know, have, you know, sensors on them, or they're using something like ADS-B, you know, to provide, you know, they're broadcasting their location so that they can avoid each other, you're probably going to start seeing collisions of these things.

1:46:29Yeah. Or like in my neighborhood, you know, I live in an older neighborhood that is full of trees. and I can definitely see these things getting caught up in these old mature trees. Here you go. Ready?

1:46:45Here comes the drone. Here comes the drone. Here comes the pool. Here comes the package. Wait a minute. No, don't do it. No. I mean, you heard the sound of that thing. They're loud. I know. I've flown drones. I know they're really loud. In fact, they got to work on quieter drones because you can't sneak up on people like you used to. They can learn from owls. Owls have the most stealthy flight characteristics in the avian world. They do. But then again, they don't hover. And they are twice their weight. We were out at the lake this afternoon just watching a couple of vultures just soar around.

1:47:30because they've got these huge wings relative to the size of their body. And most of the time, except when they're taking off, they never flap their wings. They're just soaring around. Lazily looking for carcasses. Or they could wait the extra five minutes and have an actual delivery person deliver it. I'm just going to spit the out loud. Is this true? D-Soul in our club says that Walmart finally is going to start taking Apple Pay in a week. Yeah, that's true. Tomorrow. I saw that. What? they gave in did you know i i did not believe this until i actually encountered it in the wild leo there are people who actually believed that apple pay wasn't a credit card that it was apple paying for stuff i thought it was a joke i really did well uncle apple gonna pay for this one people who are complaining i have to pay everything i put on the card but they thought they really didn't what they when they got the bill they went what i thought it was a joke and then oh it made me very sad well hey leo world lowe's and home depot just started taking um tap to pay like about a year ago i live on tap to pay man i don't i love that everywhere i go and yeah big wad of cash i just i also like it right what is cash you know who i carry the cash for I carry the watch for the stores.

1:48:54I carry the cash for the people. When I tip, I always tip in cash. That's true. That's true. Cash is king is what Lisa says. But so far, I haven't gotten a single bill for my Apple watch for years. It's gone straight to Lisa. Although this time back, Leo, this is the first time this has ever happened to me. I tipped 15 % because I always tip 15%. It's not fine dining. It was like a far restaurant. And the waiter said, oh, you know, normally the tip's 25%. And I was like, wait, what? Oh, that's not nice. I did not realize that it was that out of control in the United States. Who goes to a priest that says, you didn't give me a big enough tip?

1:49:29I didn't. We don't do that in Europe. No, they don't tip at all. In fact, Darren, our Australian, says tipping is stupid. It is. Tipping is stupid, mate. It's a uniquely North American thing. I like to tip. It makes me feel good. No, I like to tip. I would rather the people just get paid sufficiently. Well, that would be nice. said that true that would be nice all right we're gonna take a little break so i can get paid ladies and gentlemen you're watching this week at tech father robert so you have some money to give to lisa to pay off your apple pay my apple pay she hasn't seen the spark bill yet i don't know at least no no no when she gets that one yeah yeah she thought it was just a couple of mac minis yeah Hey, I feel okay.

1:50:17She just bought a car. She just came home. I saw it in the camera. Nice bright red. What color? Bright red, of course. She only buys red. Didn't she get like a CR-V or something? She got a Honda Prelude. The new Prelude. The blue that they have on the Prelude is also a fantastic color. She says it looks just like a Porsche. If I get a new BMW, I'll get a blue one because that's the BMW color. Get the Portemal blue. Portemal? Portemal blue is an excellent color. Algarve in Portugal, Portemal. All right. I'll just charge it to you, Sam. Charge it to Apple Pay. Apple Pay. You could buy anything. Our show today brought to you by Doppel.

1:50:59Oh, this is good. This you need. AI, one of the side effects of AI is social engineering. We were just talking about deep fakes, right? People are using AI to make social engineering attacks completely convincing. from phishing emails to fake websites to impersonation attempts actually uh we we had some fun with this they made anthony using a tiny sample this is the amazing thing of my voice like 20 seconds made this hey burke this is definitely not leo asking you to buy gift cards that is amazing right sounds just like me and imagine if your employee got your voice on the phone saying hey quick send a check so you got the phishing emails that look real they've got the websites that look real and now you've got voice fake deep fakes it's becoming harder and harder to tell what's real from what's designed to deceive and that's why organizations need more than a collection of point solutions they need a unified approach to stopping attacks before they reach their people doppel is the way doppel is an ai native social engineering defense platform doppel strengthens human risk management by training employees to recognize deception provides digital risk protection across every channel and delivers agentic email security that doesn't just score the inbox but takes down the attacker infrastructure behind the message wow doppel protects against the entire social engineering attack chain with one comprehensive platform.

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1:53:15Join hundreds of companies already using Doppel to protect their brand and people from social engineering attacks. Doppel, outpacing what's next in social engineering. Learn more at doppel.com. That's D-O-P-P-E-L dot com. Let me thank them so much for their support. So NVIDIA has an interesting problem. They make, of course, the graphics processors that everybody is dying to get but can't. All the data centers use them. Here's the problem. They may actually have too many soon because none of these data centers are being built fast enough to buy up all the chips. They're worried there could be a glut, which is why NVIDIA is now committing half a trillion dollars to building data centers.

1:54:04They're trying to create the demand. This is an Ohio data center, which NVIDIA is going to back with$105 billion. It's an interesting issue. There's this kind of overhang NVIDIA is facing. now i remember sam uh we we've been talking about nvidia for a long time of course famous at first for graphics cards for video games then bitcoin became hot very famous for bitcoin graphics processors they sold a lot of those you and i talked a lot about nvidia in automotive and for ai and then finally of course the ai boom has really been great for nvidia these guys uh i I got that sense talking to you maybe five or six years ago.

1:54:52Really are firing on all cylinders. Just amazing. Yeah, I mean, you know, they've been able to, it's, you know, like a surfer catching every wave. They've caught all the waves. They've caught all the waves so far. But this one may be a little bit different, ultimately, just because the size of this wave is so huge. and right now they are making so much money. But the question is, do we actually need all this data center capacity? And the thing is, NVIDIA's chips are amazing. They are incredibly powerful. But where they really shine is in doing the training. Once you get to the inference, once you've got a trained model and you're just using it for inference, you don't necessarily need that same kind of power.

1:55:53You can potentially transition over to other types of chips that are much more power efficient because these chips consume a huge amount of electricity. And that's one of the big complaints that people have about all the data centers being built is they're requiring so much electricity that it is forcing electric rates to go up in a lot of places where these data centers are being built. And it's also, if they're not able to get the local utilities to build up the capacity fast enough, You know, you've got like XAI, for example, you know, installing 35 or it's about 35 or so gas turbines to power his data centers in Memphis, which are adjacent to a predominantly low income neighborhood.

1:56:52These things are noisy. They are putting out a lot of pollution. And, you know, the data centers are loud enough. And then you've got these gas turbines running 24 hours a day to power these things. And if we can do something to reduce the power consumption, and I think this is something that a lot of people are looking at. How can we reduce the power consumption? The Blackwell chips are definitely more power efficient than – sorry, the Rubin chips are more power efficient than Blackwell was. But it's still consuming a hell of a lot of power. And one of the weird phenomenon that we've seen in the last three years since this AI data center built up is the fact that they are talking about these things.

1:57:44They're labeling them based on the amount of power they're consuming, not necessarily what they're actually capable of doing, but just how much power they're consuming. Talking about a gigawatt data center, it's consuming a gigawatt of power. That is that's enough to to supply hundreds of thousands of homes every year for one data center. And, you know, I think that if we think about that, you know, how much how much electricity we are using for these things, it's just mind boggling. And I think that's really problematic, given all the other issues we have with, you know, with the environment and energy use.

1:58:23China's doing the same thing, but they're doing it with sustainable energy. That's one way to solve it. They have such a lead on solar. Yeah. But no, we're not allowed to have nice things here. To back off on solar. Not allowed to have nice things in America. I mean, right now there is a four to eight year backlog on large turbines for gas turbine generation. They're very extremely difficult to put together. Very expensive and very difficult to ship. So even if all these data centers wanted to generate their own power, it's at least half a decade before they'll have the ability to. And those guests, they use a ridiculous amount of water.

1:59:04You're looking at two to three years for transformers. Do you think, I mean, Jensen's looked like a genius up to now. Do you think he's stumbled? Is he making a mistake? I think the mistake is that right now he is a vendor selling shovels at the gold rush. And that's a very safe place to be because you're taking on virtually no risk and you're making profit hand over fist. He is now getting into the business of running data centers. That's not speculative anymore. That's no longer selling just the tools. He's now selling the raw compute. that i i don't think that's when you're giving when you're giving the prospectors the money to buy your shovels correct that's that's where things you know start to get problematic also in the wall street journal calls attention to this there's a lot of off the books investment a ridiculous amount yeah yeah so this is the the pyramid of uh debt that is on balance sheet but and low it is the huge amount of money.

2:00:09At minimum, it's$1.65 trillion off the books. Minimum. Minimum. Yeah, because - So tell me why that's important. What does that mean? As you were saying earlier, Robert, these are all separate entities that they're creating to build these data centers. Special purpose vehicles. Yeah. And so the companies, companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others, they are they're signing agreements to use the capacity of these data centers but until the data centers actually exist you know they don't have to count that that commitment as debt or as financial commitments on their balance sheet well it's not necessarily even a commitment as elizabeth lopato points out on the verge didn't open ai promise uh or an nvidia promise 100 billion to open ai which then they said never mind so it's book to market economics and the problem is the last time we saw this done at this scale it was enron enron was the company and it wasn't even close to the scale yeah and i mean enron was a was a novice compared to what we're seeing right now so should you got all of this exceptionally nervous all it'll take is for one of the big five to go down because all of their circular deals with one with each other are dependent on the cash flow between each of those entities but so if you have open ai going why are they doing this because they have too much money now yeah they have too much money and they need to put it somewhere yeah i mean the vcs have so much money that they're they're putting into these ai companies and you know companies like real money or is it funny money i mean if it's real money that's okay right it's it's it's it's real money that they're putting in with the expectation of exploding that amount of money in the future years.

2:01:59But in order, they're putting real money into companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, who are then committing to building these data centers with even more money, money which has to be borrowed by these special purpose entities that Robert referred to. And that's that off-the-books debt, which doesn't show up on the balance sheets of these companies until those data centers are built. But in the process, somebody's already borrowing all this money. Companies like Larry Ellison, Oracle. I think they were the biggest or second biggest, I think, on that list off the books. So it's like a pyramid scheme, kind of.

2:02:44Here's the off-balance sheet obligations. Look at Alphabet. $900 billion. dollars they are the largest than meta microsoft oracle oracle's got a mere 300 billion oh okay oh well they're good to go yeah they're fine amazon uh and nvidia is actually the other 110 billion that larry's got to spend on warner brothers but right so why are the the reason they're putting this money and the reason this money is available the reason people are loaning this money and investing this money is because there's a feeling that there is a lot of money at the other side. There's a huge upside to this based on what?

2:03:24AI? No, based on the current market. Just look what happened with SpaceX. You have a company that we know doesn't make money, that's going to lose money hand over fist, and yet people bought into it. That's all they need. They're going to get paid. These VCs are going to get paid. All they have to do is maintain the path because nothing in the recent market history has showed them otherwise who's they only have to wait until they can cash out and after the ipo is it retail investors is it institutional oh yeah absolutely retail investors are holding the bag for everything all the investment funds my 401k my retirement that i'm going to count on in my golden years which are going to be in any minute you might want to consider converting that to cash yeah you know i'm just controlling what's in the index you guys all scared me so six months ago i did and then i went no and i bought back in and i'm glad i did because it's gone up up up exactly so people see it go up up up even though there's nothing underneath that why should spacex go up when they're losing billions of dollars a year it's on the promise that maybe in the future they might do something that makes profit actually what i end up buying is index funds and market baskets and mutual funds because i don't want to invest in any particular tech company but those all of those funds but if you look at what's in those magnificent seven have bought into the yeah yeah i get it yeah yeah but what do i do as uh some poor schmuck who's just trying to keep my retirement alive you're right because if you are not buying into the wave then it's almost like you're losing you feel like you're losing out you're a safe investment when someone else has two x four percent inflation my money's shrinking by four percent every year i guess i could i don't what's i don't know i could buy gold i don't know if that's a good good investment either i mean i can get upset at what i see in the market but the problem is nobody knows how how it runs anymore it's not running on pe it's not running on basic fundamentals so the hype is just as good a metric as any other i guess okay we're not financial experts and do not take any advice yeah definitely don't take really really seriously don't don't do that don't do that

2:05:40yeah mike b says i need a better money manager better than me

2:05:47the things magic beans leo it's all about magic that's the heart the hard part of all of this is you know no you can't time the market and so you know you know that in your heart you probably should get out but when yeah yeah you're lucky robert because you have a big institution behind you that probably won't go and we're extremely conservative about investments i bet you um so but i mean like louis the 14th melted down all his gold furniture so that he could pay for his that's right i don't have any gold furniture i only invest in tulips leo tulips the bulbs they're gonna be big all right time for a break our show today you're listening to robert balasair the digital jesuit visiting us from las vegas where he was just at defcon great to see you robert how's your family everybody good everyone is good everyone's healthy and uh actually i just took him on a road trip to the san francisco so that was nice oh yeah aren't you a good son and uh and sam abu samad whose brilliant wife got me lifting kettlebells and swinging clubs and thank her for that because uh i will it's been i thank her every day yes she's wonderful uh he's of course the host of the wheel bearings podcast we're glad you're both here we're glad you're here especially our club members who make all of this possible thank you our show this week brought to you by oh another new sponsor built b-i-l-t here's a question are you getting rewarded for paying your rent or your mortgage right now we're just talking about finance right Are you, you're not getting rewarded for paying your rent or your mortgage?

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2:08:53It'll tell you about exclusive member benefits at restaurants, fitness studios, on your Lyft rides, and more around your home. And if you're a homeowner, Bilt works not just for rent but for mortgages too. Your housing payment. Isn't that one of your biggest monthly expenses? Why wouldn't you want to earn points? You're paying it anyway. download the built app and join the membership for where you live at joinbuilt.com slash twit that's j-o-i-n-b-i-l-t dot com slash twit use our link so they know we sent you joinbuilt.com slash twit j-o-i-n-b-i-l-t dot com slash twit now i get the name built i get it uh we are going crazy by the way in the ai world in many many ways obviously but uh certainly the the chinese models are gaining a lot of attention uh it seems like every week a new one comes out there's one right now everybody's speculating about it's free it was free for a few more days it was free this week on open router and uh it It was free on Noose, which I use for my subscriptions.

2:10:07No one knows where it's from. It's called Ox Ox Alpha. And it seems pretty good. And the consensus is it is probably the latest from a Chinese AI company, probably Z.ai, which does GLM. The GLM models are really good. And this one's free for a week. A lot of people are using it. glm53 which came out uh i think a few weeks ago is doing really well bloomberg says gpu z.ai is iterating fast and this is concerning to the government the white house apparently drafting plans to require countries to pick a side in the u.s china ai competition this is according to Reuters, they're saying to companies and countries, you should not be using Chinese models.

2:11:04Yeah, because we've got a lot of really good sway and goodwill that we spread around the world. So I'm sure that everybody trusts us right now. It's really a new way to exercise soft power. I mean, China's done this with their Belt and Roads Initiative, where they help people build dams and roads in third world countries, gaining friendship. It's soft power. Now this is it. And I can't say it's a bad thing. We currently are in an environment where our government does not believe in soft power. They only believe in hard power. They believe in transactional relationships. And that's not going to invite anyone to actually help us with this.

2:11:39And a fascinating comment from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the other day after the trade talks broke down. He said, yeah, the U.S. is now signing agreements in pencil. i kind of like mark carney he's really outspoken and i kind of enjoy his point of view even though it is at our expense uh i'm a i was i'm a french canadian i can i can say that one uh let's talk let's talk flock um there's so much i have three flock cameras within a block of my house right now yeah there is in in our little town there are flock cameras two of which are pointed at the public swimming pool that sounds like a good idea i don't think there's any license plates going by so flock is we normally i think of it as an alpr automated license plate reader which look you know that's how they sold it that's how they sold it at the beginning they said we're only tracking license plates and and and to be fair you you don't have a right to use the public streets to drive on them you have to get a license you have to take tests you have to show your competence unless you're an automated driving system right then then all bets are off yeah but despite what sovereign citizens might say you know this it's a privilege not a right and and i guess it's reasonable to say law enforcement should have automated license plate readers it's helpful in tracking lost vehicles tracking stolen you know kidnapped people it's uh there's all sorts of law enforcement uses for it the problem is it seems to be law enforcement well we've seen a number of cases uses it for other reasons including stalking girlfriends uh polices are being told by a usage policy for the flight flock license plate reader not to talk about the cameras uh this is from bruce schneier do not mention alpr usage to the occupants of the vehicle do not mention alpr usage in your report in your police report or your complaint unless absolutely necessary why why are they trying to hide this what are alpr readers good for what are they not good for and what are they doing beyond reading license plates uh because they're violating in the Constitution of the United States.

2:14:07And they are actually collecting a lot more than just license plate data. Fourth Amendment. Fourth Amendment, yeah. So here's the problem. In order for law enforcement to be able to do an investigation on you, they first have to have probable cause, and then they have to obtain a warrant in order to look into your affairs and see if there's actually any crimes being committed. Law enforcement can now bypass that by buying a subscription from Flock because it's not a government agency that's collecting information on the individual. it's a private company and the government agencies is buying that data from a private company.

2:14:39It completely bypasses the fourth amendment. And law enforcement knows this. That's why they're trying not to mention flock when they're writing out these reports, because they don't want that question of whether or not that evidence should be permissible. Well, when you put, okay, one of the things we know is good for law enforcement is to put officers on foot walking through neighborhoods looking around kind of like a flock camera would making observations uh they don't arrest somebody till there's probable cause but they're always looking how is this different from that because this goes forward and back in time this is data that's always stored this is why flock tried to make a big hoo-ha but oh no no we're only collecting license plates until now it's been revealed no no they collect everything they collect what else images bumper stickers on your car identities identities they're collecting identities they're collecting clothing they're collecting any uh distinguishing factors that can be used in biometric location later on they've just released a a new product to law enforcement that it's basically an ai prompt you can say find me everyone who um interacted with this red car between this date and this date and because that got cameras everywhere, they can not just find the people, but they can find the addresses that those people ended up at.

2:15:59That's too much. That's too much. I've also seen some communities installing Bluetooth sniffers on their flop cameras. So they capture every, you know, when you're driving down the street with your phone, it's advertising its Bluetooth presence, including your phone's name. Yeah, they're starting to consolidate all kinds of information from different sources. And they had a deal earlier It was either earlier this year or late last year with Ring to start consolidating, trying to fuse information from Ring cameras with the Flock database. So, as Robert said, this is collecting way too much information.

2:16:36So it's way more than just the license plates. There's bumper stickers. If there's a dent in the car, they're putting together all kinds of little bits that go way beyond what they have publicly said. And also, sometimes the information is just plain wrong. I put in a story down below. I don't think you guys talked about it previously. This was actually about a month ago. Two friends of mine who are both auto riders got picked up by police because of incorrect flock data. They both happened to be driving press vehicles from Jaguar Land Rover. And the way it works with the press fleets, usually the manufacturers that own these vehicles, they usually put on manufacturer plates from whatever state they happen to be based in.

2:17:32JLR is based in New Jersey. JLR North America is based in New Jersey. So they have New Jersey manufacturer plates and the manufacturer plates usually are a little bit different from the others. In New Jersey, in Michigan, they look like regular plates, except there's the middle characters in M. In New Jersey, manufacturer. Yeah. In New Jersey, they have the manufacturer plates are three, four and DTM. And then there's a two digit number that's much smaller in the middle in between the 34 and the DTM. And somebody had incorrectly entered information in California into the Flock system, or I think actually into a system for reporting stolen or missing license plates.

2:18:20And they missed the middle two digits, and they just had the 34 DTM. And so the flock cameras, the flock system will capture partial information because a lot of times police, you know, when they put information, they may have a partial plate. So they put in the 34 DTM. And so as soon as the flock cameras noticed vehicles with the 30 with the with the New Jersey manufacturer plates on them, it flagged it for the local police. And so my friend Joel Fetter, who lives near Minneapolis, he had been it turns out he had been tracked for four days by flock cameras before the police. Why did they think they were was it mistakenly reported?

2:19:06The license plate was reported as stolen, but mistakenly reported as stolen. when somebody managing the press fleet in California had incorrectly put in information into the license plate system. So the manufacturer. No, it wasn't stolen. It was reported as missing. Sometimes when they're doing marketing photo shoots, they'll take the license plates off and put on a different license plate. And so they had misplaced it. It wasn't stolen. They lost the license plate, not the car. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, so they flocked, misinterpreted the whole thing as a stolen vehicle. And so Joel and his wife were going up running some errands.

2:19:48I'm watching Joel's video on here, and the police were fairly understanding about this. Yeah, but this whole thing took over an hour before they got it sorted out. And that has a relatively happy ending. Yeah. Joel is white. Imagine if this had been another one of my friends whose skin tone is a different color. Right. It might not have turned out. He was surrounded by three officers, four police, four police cars. Yeah. And we don't have to imagine it boxed. It's already happened. Three days after this, another friend of mine, Tim Esterdahl, who lives in Nebraska, was driving another JLR press vehicle.

2:20:27Exactly the same situation, but those two small middle digits were different digits from the ones that were on Joel's car and the ones on the original missing license plate. And he got pulled over, and he was held for about an hour and a half while they sorted out the situation. I mean, this is ridiculous that this is happening. And the information should have been corrected as soon as they sorted it out with Joel. But it wasn't. And three days later, it happened again in a different state. There have been more than 30 cases, Leo. 30 cases of misidentified vehicles that led to arrests. In a couple of those cases, people sat in jail because even though the officers knew that the data didn't match what their terminal was telling them that this was a suspect.

2:21:18So, again, there's a question. The big question for me here is accountability. Who is responsible when it gets it wrong? Because the police officers are saying it's Flock and Flock is saying it's the police officers, which means that someone who gets caught up in one of these mistakes, they have no recourse. a grand jury declined to indict a man who was caught on camera destroying a flock poll there is a backlash the people are starting to see that these flock cameras are everywhere we're living in a surveillance society and a grand jury in ohio refused which very by the way very rare grand jury will refuse a uh an indictment um the prosecution you can indict a hand sandwich that's the saying if a prosecution wanted to they could indict a ham sandwich in this case the grand jury said no uh uh he was he removed the bolts on the alpr pole toppled it over and destroyed the surveillance camera and its solar panel and nobody's nobody's unhappy about that except the police and a lot of communities have been canceling their flock contracts although some have been uh following that up by signing contracts with axon the company that makes tasers and they because they have their own ALPR system.

2:22:34The problem is that canceling the flock contract just means they're canceling the service that doesn't necessarily remove the camera. Right. And so there is a solution for that. Fortunately, because the flock cameras are being paid for with taxpayer dollars, we have a responsibility to make sure these things are properly taken care of. And they're all outside. So they're exposed to a lot of UV radiation and you don't want them to get sunburned so somebody has actually come up with uh something uh with the uh the flock sock um that you can you can you can get uh to protect your local flock cameras uh from uv radiation oh yeah because they're so dangerous you know that's bad the sun is so bad as you know you don't want them to get sunburn exactly yeah it's a carbon fiber sock you don't have to take the pole down just I'm sure this is illegal.

2:23:22You know, Leo, actually, on a completely unrelated note, at DEF CON, we may have had access to some Flock hardware. And we discovered that in the newer models, they're installing cut filters so that if red or green lasers are shined thrown through the lens, it will protect the sensor from being burned out. Unfortunately, it does not really stop blue lasers. So if you have a high-intensity blue laser, you can burn out the sensor almost immediately. Yeah, I mean, definitely don't play around with blue lasers. But don't do that. Don't do that. don't do that i'm sure this is illegal and we are not advocating anything we are not we specifically said not to play with blue lasers near flock camp if you wonder if you're wondering where the flock camera near you is uh this is a map called d flock which records which the ceo flock called this a terroristic organization it was just public information yeah yeah sorry you think you have the right to know what flock cameras are in your neighborhood camera has no reasonable expectation of privacy if it's on a public road i'm just saying it's yeah uh fortunately my little town look at that my community does not have uh flock cameras um and neither does ann arbor which is neighboring us uh there are flock the thing the other thing to keep in mind is not all contracts with flock are from communities some of them are on private property so even though ipsalini Township and the city of Ypsilanti don't have any flock cameras.

2:24:47There are a couple of major retailers nearby me here that have a bunch of flock cameras in their parking lots. Wow. Of course, they might not need it now that they've got their flock drones. So what's that all about? Flock drones? That's their next big growth market. They've realized that they can do plate reading from a distance with drones that don't have to worry about things like permits or being allowed to by the city. They can just overfly an unregulated space and have pretty much immunity from any sort of backlash because you can't even see it. Wow. It's a lot harder to protect your flock drones with flock socks, though, if they're up in the air like that.

2:25:28But that's why I order stuff from Amazon constantly, just to create a line of drones that defends that area from flock drones. Defense orders. These are defensive. um yeah and by the way not all cameras on poles or flock cameras there are that's right yeah red light cameras right and there's also axon as i mentioned oh axon makes them too but red light cameras aren't necessarily or are they tracking every license plate that goes by usually they should they take a picture when they take a picture the resolution's not high enough to really do that it's it's kind of chunky well i mean they're high enough to read they're high enough to read the license you got to know who to send the ticket to a single but that's a single view it's just a single shot when the light changes they take a picture in case anybody goes through the intersection okay well we'll keep an eye on this one it is interesting though because we i i thought that we were at that point that we were so desensitized to cameras in public because it's in everything you just always assume something's going to be recorded that flock has managed to pretty much energize people from the left and the right no matter what your political leaning might be to say this is not okay we know we do not like this yeah um we don't mind it against our enemies but here at home not here not here this is here at home this is palantir for domestic use the two the two things that are seem to be uniting people on the left and the right are flock cameras and data centers.

2:26:56Data centers. Everybody hates them both. Yeah. Actually, you could run a campaign today. You could just say, all I care about is no more data centers and no more flock cameras. You'd win. You'd probably win. You'd win. Well, it's funny. Here in Michigan, the Republican candidate for the Senate seat, U.S. Senate seat is Mike Rogers. And a couple of days ago, he came out backing a data center moratorium for a year. Because it's good for the voters. Right. However, it also turns out that he personally has invested about$2.5 million in data centers, like Blackstone real estate trusts that are in building data centers.

2:27:42He's like an optimist pessimist. He thinks the glass is both half full and half empty. No, he's like an engineer. He thinks the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. Yes, I love that. I love that. All right, one more break. A few more stories. Now that we've got you all head up over flock, I guess, you know, we're going to have to keep covering this story. This is a growing story. And it kind of snuck up on us. These, I mean, between ring cameras everywhere and flock cameras. There's 120 ,000 of these things in the country. Well, you know what it is, Leo? So the Technorati have been, we have been raging against the growing omnipresent surveillance state for what, two decades now?

2:28:25And every time they've kind of hemmed and hawed about it. So I think we just assumed everyone's going to be okay with everything. So the fact that this finally crosses a line, I kind of enjoy it. I mean, you talked earlier about the backlash against big tech. I think the reason why we're seeing this backlash is because of leaders in big tech, people like Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and so many others that are – many of them – some of them are openly advocating for the end of democracy, the end of freedom. Yeah. And what's the name of that ridiculous philosopher that they all follow? Nietzsche?

2:29:11or no no no no the this this uh silicon valley guy um oh the wannabe anrand um yeah his face uh i can't remember his name i know you're not peter teal no no teal teal is a follower of this guy um i know what you're talking about i can't remember his name right now yeah flock says In 2025, it helped locate 10 ,000-plus missing people. 42 % of flock customers, that is cities, recovered more than half of all stolen vehicles. One in five cases were cleared involving flock evidence, including abducted children, home invasions. It wouldn't work in Las Vegas because 90 % of the cars aren't registered.

2:30:02Curtis Yarvin. Yeah, Curtis Yarvin. Okay. None of that matters because you've passed the line, the ick line. You've done something that has collectively made the public say, no, I don't want that. I don't know why that stands out for me, but I don't want that. And that's flock right now. Flock can say anything they want. And people would just say, we can't trust you anymore. You cross that line and there's no way back. Right. All right. We'll take a break. Come back and talk about something nice. Thank you. Something light. Something like a drone dropping a package into a swing pool. You're watching This Week in Tech with Father Robert Ballasair, the digital Jesuit, and Sam Abul Salmon.

2:30:48My car guy, Molly White, who was scheduled this week, has moved to next week. Couldn't make it this week, but we look forward to having her on next week on the show. This Week in Tech brought to you by Adaptive, the first security awareness platform built to stop AI-powered social engineering. Here's the shift. Attackers don't need malware anymore. They just need trust, a cloned voice, a convincing deep fake on Zoom, or an AI-written phish that looks like it came from your IT team. Guess what? It didn't. adaptive prepares your organization with simulations across email sms and voice deep fakes vishing that's voice phishing and ai generated phishing including scenarios that can mirror your own brand and executives and when employees report something suspicious adaptive can help you triage it fast so security teams aren't buried in false alarms if you need training fast with adaptive's ai content creator you can turn a breaking threat something that just happened an incident report or a compliance doc so somebody said we got to do this now into interactive multilingual modules in minutes you don't need a design team you just need adaptive with adaptive you can build customize and monitor every part of your training with complete personalization the result is a more resilient security culture which is essential for companies like plaid i use plaid you probably do too it's it powers thousands of digital finance apps and links consumers, developers, and institutions.

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2:33:01Did you see? This is - A happy story, Leo. It has to be a happy story. There's nothing happier than when robots hurt themselves. This is the fast robot at the Olympic Tri - Oh, he just ran into the - Oh, that's got to end up. blew up oh wow sparks the robot olympics are going on in china right now this they by the way the robots beat the human record wobbly there in the middle the hundred yard dash i'm sorry it's you should you know what we're now on record at laughing at robot mayhem just for those which means we're gonna get it we're the first up against the wall after the robot revolt so leo when if if ai robots want to board a passenger plane do they have to remove their lithium batteries before they get on board that's a good question see these are these are over 100 million or 100 watt hours at the chinese robot olympics uh a robot beat usain bolt's record for the hundred yard dash by uh several uh tenths of a second well that's like a car beat him it's right Right, I know.

2:34:08So what, right? It's a robot. Was it named Usain Bolt? No, it was not. Okay, that's it. It was named Volt. I like that one. I like that. Yeah, this robot, not obviously one of the victors in that 100-yard dash. But it was fast. I don't know. I think it's kind of scary, actually. I don't want robots to run faster than humans. But, Leah, do you remember like 16, 17 years ago when we started watching those DARPA challenges and we were laughing at them falling over. I mean, the fact that they've done this in just over a decade, that's, okay, it's impressive. Even if you don't like it, it's impressive.

2:34:45A lot of the same people that were building those early DARPA Challenge vehicles are the ones leading these companies today. Chris Urmson, Brian Seleski from Carnegie Mellon, they led the Waymo program for quite a few years until they went off and did their own thing. Many of the others that were involved in those programs are still involved today, and they've learned so much. Yeah. We've come a long way, baby. Meanwhile, Chris Thurmson's got, you know, his company is running autonomous trucks around Texas and New Mexico now. Yeah. But can you play crisis on it? That's all it matters. You can't get, I'll tell you what, you can't do it.

2:35:33you probably could you can't get them in the united states they are banned in the the us just like bydg robots yeah fcc last month added advanced robotic devices to its list of banned devices because of their national security risks uh robot vacuums here included lawnmowers included yeah i hope you enjoy anything that generates a map anything with a camera yep new models with a microphone made humanoids quadrupeds to qualify for entry a robot needs to be assembled in the u.s with 65 or more of its components by value produced in the u.s and of course so that's zero zero that's we have none of those i think the boston robotics stuff is actually made here they got bought all of their own all of the assemblies i think so yeah the hyundai hyundai owns them but um i think they're i think they are made in the u.s hyundai's south korean company so not on the banned list because i can't see a lot of the electronics from bosom dynamics coming from u.s fabs well that's the problem in fact well the chips the chips probably aren't but this but that's the important part yeah i mean an aluminum arm isn't going to report back home it's the electronics that are going to so that's the important parts and the software right yeah And this is problematic for U.S.

2:36:55robotic companies like Boston Dynamics because they can't get the parts they need because those are banned as well. On a corollary, on this Asia trip that I just did, one of our primary vehicles was a BYD. And that is a really nice vehicle. It was an extremely nice vehicle. And inexpensive, right? And crazy. Half the price of a Tesla, twice the luxury of a Tesla, the range of a Tesla. I'm thinking, wait, is this the reason why they're banned? They're going to be selling across the river in the next couple of months. Canada. Yeah. But you can't bring it into the U.S. You get like 120 % tariff or something.

2:37:34Well, I mean, there's the tariff, but also there's a bill in Congress, sadly, co-sponsored by one of my state senators, one of my senators. Yeah, because he's protecting the big three. They would ban those vehicles from even being brought into the U.S. So you can't even register it in the U.S. Not just that, but like the U.S. ambassador to Canada said that they are going to institute a policy to not even allow them to cross the border. Not just not register them. Like a Canadian that happens to own one would not be allowed to drive it into the U.S. Wow. Meanwhile, Dan O'Dowd, who we had on Wednesday, we talked about it, who is the Dawn Project founder and the guy crusading against Tesla.

2:38:20also warned us about the vulnerability of our grid our water systems uh here's a story we are Brian Barrett Andy Greenberg writing China is strapping digital bombs to civilian infrastructure we don't need a digital bomb we need we need the infrastructure that we've been implementing for the last 40 years this has been a def a defcon talk for what 20 years now the SCADA the supervisory control and data acquisition devices that basically run every water plant every power plant are so woefully poor when it comes to security that at defcon we we can violate these within a minute like 60 seconds get and we'll be in the device using probably technology written by us and israeli security companies it was called stuxnet it was used to destroy scatter centrifuges in iran but it but it leaked it leaked it leaked all over the place now everyone has access to it and and those devices they were never designed for the internet they predate the internet they were air capped but remember they had to do uh exactly candy drops to get them on the uh skater and then they tried to slap on security at the end but we know that doesn't work that never works they're just they they they should be every single one of them should be just put them all in a sandbox so that they can't oh never mind so you've you've heard about assault typhoon which is the chinese uh infestation of our phone networks which by the way nobody can do anything about because if you fixed it it not only would it cost a lot you'd have to rip out all this equipment you'd have to rip out everything and you the telecommunication system would be down during that process yep now they're calling it it's not salt typhoon it's volt typhoon same idea a Chinese cyber attack on our infrastructure, water and electricity.

2:40:17And as Dan O'Dowd pointed out, if they were to pull the trigger on that, we would be starving within days. I mean, literally, without food. A blackout, you could trigger a nationwide blackout by attacking nine of the ten most important substations in the country. And not cyberattacking, like with a gun or with a Molotov cocktail. sale if you took out nine we wouldn't be able to restore power across the United States for months that's how long in the face of salt typhoon T-Mobile did do something about this uh this is a report from Bloomberg Cyber security staff at T-Mobile chopped a cable they this is the cable they cut it uh as they were looking for salt typhoon when they found it there's a frayed piece of yellow Ethernet cable on display at T-Mobile's Seattle headquarters.

2:41:13A security staffer cut it during an intense nationwide hunt for Chinese spies, Salt Typhoon. They weren't able to get rid of Salt Typhoon entirely from their network, but that's one way to do it. Just cut the Ethernet. That has a history. Do you remember when the I Love You worm was first released back in the was at 90s yeah yeah you had one network administrator who panicked and just took an axe to the communications trunk coming into the university that was my one of my favorite stories it worked it worked yeah that's a little harder to repair than a single severed ethernet cable um but meanwhile um robots are running into walls at the chinese olympics and bursting into flame and that's when i like all i know we did we're doing it again because this is funny it's funny that is so funny it's that backpedaling the backpedaling just sells it for me so to describe it it's at a hundred yard dash running down the track for some reason it loses track of the course runs into a wall stumbles backwards and bursts into a shower of sparks oh poor leo could you could you delete this can't even stay in its front and its lane no i don't i don't want future ais to see me laughing at this that then i know uh we have mark for termination oh no we have to cut that out i just play it again as a moose bush after all of the disaster stories and disaster scenarios we've been talking about today i don't know i will say though that's progress that is still progress they will learn what called that caused that failure state and it will fix it don't don't run into the walls i guess that would be well that's what yeah that's what you're gonna see chasing after you and you're running away yeah faster than you can run faster than usain bolt can run or we could go really dark and the thing is you just have to be faster than the guy next to you that's you don't have to be faster than a robot sam yeah uh sam abu sam it always a pleasure thank you so much for being here uh He is the VP of Research at Telemetry where he covers automotive tech.

2:43:27No one knows more than Sam does. You can get a little bit of that in his podcast, Wheel Bearings with Robbie and Nicole, wheelbearings.media. No more Nicole. Nicole is retired. Yeah. She's walked away from the whole automotive journalism stuff. I love Robbie, though. In fact, we've got to get him on the show. Yeah, absolutely. Roberto Baldwin. And he could talk about his many cover bands. Yeah. He just did a show last night with the Talking Heads Band. Oh, nice. Oh, nice. Robbie's great. I love Robbie. Yeah, he is awesome. Send Benito his contact. I will do that. We've gotten out of touch with him, and I just really always enjoy having him on.

2:44:05He'd be great. And in addition to wheel bearings, I've got a couple other podcasts. Oh, tell me about it. My telemetry transportation daily, which is like a two-minute daily hit on some interesting news item in the transportation space. And we also have the Green Cars podcast that we're doing, where we interview interesting people in the transportation space. This past week's show, we had Scott Case, who's the CEO of Recurrent, a really interesting company that gathers data on EV batteries, both for to allow people to track the health of their battery and their EVs, but also to help figure out the value of EVs for resale.

2:44:56And they're doing a lot of really interesting stuff. It was a fascinating conversation. And this week, coming up on Wednesday, we are going to have Alan Clark, who is the VP of Advanced Development Projects at Ford. He is the leader of Ford's Skunk Works project that has been working on low-cost EVs. And so their first product is the new Ford Fathom, a compact electric pickup truck. So it's about a maverick-sized pickup. This is their slate competitor, right? Yeah. And it's going to be, I mean, they're out and about testing now. They should be starting deliveries to consumers probably about this time next year, I think, or late summer or sometime in the fall.

2:45:43The plant is being retooled right now. They're going to start pilot production there early in the new year. I thought they'd given up on electric trucks. They gave up on the Lightning because electric full-size trucks are kind of the wrong product. People who buy F-150s are not buying electric F-150s. A lot of people buy trucks thinking, oh, yeah, I'm going to do a bunch of towing. But the reality is the way people actually use their trucks, the F-150 is actually the best. The Lightning was actually the best version of the F-150. And for what most people actually use an F-150 for, they would be much better off with a Lightning than a gas one.

2:46:22But for the people that are towing, it's the wrong vehicle for towing a big trailer. But for smaller vehicles like the Fathom, which is about the size of a Maverick, it's going to be a great solution. And they're doing a whole bunch of other products off that same architecture as well. So check that out on Wednesday, Alan Clark, to talk about what the Skunk Works was, what they're trying to do, and how they're developing their new EVs. I think I met Alan, didn't I? When I was buying the Mach-E. No, that was Darren Palmer. That's right, Darren. Yeah. Alan has not been out and about very much since he joined Ford a few years ago.

2:47:07But that's starting to change now as they get closer to the launch of the. I'm glad to see American car companies not give up on EVs. I love my EV. Yeah. I mean, my wife has said she will not go back to a gas car. and she loves driving her EV6. And recently her best friend bought a Chevy Blazer EV, loves it. Nice. Although the dealer didn't do a great job of explaining a bunch of stuff. And so she came over here and I spent a little time. Time will tell you. Yeah. Here's how you open the charge port door and here's how you plug in the charger. Right, right. Like, oh, dealers. green cars the podcast and of course the telemetry a daily podcast thank you uh and wheel bearings some wheel bearings and then all the stuff that we do at telemetry as well so have microphone will travel sam abil samet thank you sam father robert ballas here when do you go back to uh italy september 10th the morning of september 10th um i'm jumping on a plane to get on back to italy right after the big apple event you're going to cupertino the day before yes of course of course no actually i don't know how much of this i can i can i can say this i am doing creative work for a big content producer in the bay area yeah i can say that not me that you that you will see on the big screen at some point yes so i get to do some fun stuff a few that is i won't i i won't i will not i cannot say any names that i did have to sign a bunch of ndas oh i know oh i know when when will we see this stuff uh this no no i think the release is christmas i think the release is christmas yeah and what kind of work are you doing are you praying over it or what all sorts of work uh you know there's stuff in a new animated movie things and stuff and yeah maybe robert you're amazing if you've if you've uh just think of my background my ethnic background and you can probably figure out the movie i'm just i'm just gonna put it that way oh how exciting uh i don't know uh you can look it up you'll find street balutes i don't know what is it on actually what i really want though is i really want a leo t-shirt uh well i was just gonna say uh you'll find me on the streets selling uh leo t-shirts uh i got i got a lot of them those actually do look really good leo they do look good thanks to jeff atwood for making these actually the whole story is he of course is one of the creators of discourse which is the forum software we use and on their uh executive page all of the executives are portrayed as uh as busts like this so he decided to make me an honorary bustee it's pretty good did you know that at the pixar studios in oakland yeah there's a bust of william shakespeare and if you flip the head of the bust back there's a switch like that if you click that switch it opens up a secret door yeah steve jobs and a bunch of pixar animators used to have their friday booze and cards nights now that's cool yeah that's very cool see he knows a lot he knows he knows where all the secrets are that's father robert ballas there anything else you want to uh mention uh no i'm heading back to uh the rome after i've been on the road basically for almost coming up in three months so i'm excited to just get back and try to remember what i was doing before i left get back to your little cell and your hard bed and the next time you'll be coming through is when when?

2:50:58I don't know soon I hope I love Rome I would move to Rome if I could I just found out about this on our campus I had no idea it existed there is a special place with two much nicer rooms that have a private common area like a little kitchen it's own patio that looks out over Rome It's a special guest place that we can reserve that I'm just saying. You're just mean to me. It's got two rooms attached to it. All right. I'll be there. Count me in. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, Sam. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do Twit every Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us do it if you want.

2:51:46We do it live in front of a non-studio audience. Of course, club members get special access in the Discord. If you're not a club member, this would be a good time to join. We need you. Twit.tv slash club twit. Support the programming we do. If you enjoy it, it would sure be nice to have you. Lots of benefits, including the Discord access and ad-free versions of all the shows. Twit.tv slash club twit for more information. You can also watch, even if you're not a club member, you can watch us live on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. We're everywhere. after the fact download audio or video of the show from our website twit.tv there's a youtube channel with a video of course if you go to youtube.com slash twit you could find all of the shows and all the channels or subscribe in your favorite podcast client you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done and that's nice you'll have it just in time for your monday morning commute uh thank you all for being here thanks to our producer uh benito gonzalez appreciate your hard work Benito our editor Kevin King our executive producer Lisa Laporte and I will see you all on Tuesday for MacBreak Weekly meanwhile another twit is in the can bye-bye this is amazing