TWiT 1049: Gas Station Lafufu - Apple's Pumpkin Spice Orange & Influencer Era

[00:00:00] It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech. What a great panel. Jason Hiner's here from ZDNet, Dan Patterson from Blackbird AI, and The Verge's Victoria song. Victoria and Jason were both at the Apple event. We'll have the inside story of all that Apple announced. We're going to talk about the uproar going on in Nepal. Turns out you turn off people's social media, they get pretty upset. And the new little teeny records coming from Target. All that more coming up next on TWIT.

[00:00:29] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.

[00:00:41] This is TWIT. This Week in Tech, Episode 1049, recorded Sunday, September 14th, 2025. Gas Station Lafufu. It's time for TWIT. This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. And it has been, as the TV hosts say, a busy week. Fortunately, we have a lovely panel joining us. Jason Hiner is here, Editor in Chief at ZDNet, our good friend. Hello, Jason. Jason Hiner Hey, good to be here. Jason Hiner Hey, good to see you. How's up?

[00:01:10] Jason Hiner Yes. I got nothing to say. I'm just welcome and it's always good to see you. It's always good to see you. Jason Hiner Likewise, my friend. Jason Hiner Dan Patterson, who for many years was at CBS. He's been on our show for years and years and years. He's now at Blackbird AI, where they're doing their best to Jason Hiner Disabuse Disinformation. Jason Hiner That's a wonderful word. Jason Hiner Disabuse. Jason Hiner Yes.

[00:01:37] Jason Hiner I want to disabuse you of your disinformation, because you're all wrong. Jason Hiner Yeah, especially this week. Jason Hiner Oh my God. Yeah. Well, we're not going to go into that actually, because it's really more of a journalism story. But yeah. Jason Hiner I was just talking about the new iPhones. Jason Hiner Oh, okay. There you go. Well, speaking of the new iPhones, we're thrilled to have Victoria Song here. She is, of course, at The Verge Senior Review.

[00:02:00] Jason Hiner And Victoria was at the Apple Campus for the big event on Tuesday. Hi, Victoria. Victoria Song Hi, thanks for having me. And I was in fact running around that entire campus that entire day. Jason Hiner The whole thing. Well, it's good. It's a ring. Victoria Song Yeah. You know, they actually have these little mini golf carts because it's too far to go from one building to another for your briefings. Jason Hiner So they ferry you around in golf carts.

[00:02:27] Victoria Song Yes, you get ferried around in golf carts. And once in a while, there's good music on the golf cart, but not always. Jason Hiner They have music. Wow. Victoria Song Yeah, sometimes. Jason Hiner I know you're a little tired because you have now written three, count of three reviews, which will be staged out over the embargo period. Tomorrow, your AirPods 3 review, right? Tuesday, your Apple Watch review. Are you going to do the Ultra as well as the 11? Jason Hiner She can't talk about that, Leo. You can't ask her.

[00:02:55] Jason Hiner Oh, you can't even say that you've got a review. Jason knows the rules. I don't know the rules because I don't ever. Jason Hiner You can't ask her that. Don't ask her that. Jason Hiner Don't. Okay. Don't get her to ask her that. Jason Hiner You can ask anything. Jason Hiner That's true. You can ask whatever you want. Jason Hiner Victoria You can recuse yourself. Say, I plead the fifth. Jason Hiner I plead the fifth. I am under embargo. And you'll find out for what? When the embargo lifts.

[00:03:18] Jason Hiner Oh, we can't even say when the embargo deadlines are typically Apple will keep the iPhone embargo till Wednesday, the Wednesday before the phone ships. I know that. Jason Hiner What embargo, Leo? I don't know. Jason Hiner Oh, well, look, I know there's an embargo. You guys don't know. That's fine. I am in no way indebted to Apple. In fact, they don't even like me. So... Jason Hiner They love you. They just don't admit it out loud. Jason Hiner They don't love me. That's very true.

[00:03:47] Jason Hiner Victoria Victoria Does Vox have lawyers look at your embargoes? Jason Hiner She doesn't have embargoes. Jason Hiner I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That was the wrong question to ask. Jason Hiner Vox generally doesn't get the lawyers involved unless you're liable to piss off somebody in a way that is, you know, dangerous to Vox's livelihood. Jason Hiner I've always had a policy of not doing NDAs with anybody. Not so much. I mean, I don't like the idea.

[00:04:17] Jason Hiner But also, I'm a loud mouth. I'm a blabber mouth. I can't... If I know something, I'm very... Because I have... I'm on the air like 20 hours a week. So, inevitably, I'm going to say something just to fill time. Jason Hiner You can push back on most of these companies for NDAs. If you say like, look, I'll agree to the embargo, but we don't sign an NDA. Because a lot of them will try to make you sign NDAs when you don't need to. And so, if you tell them that, they will almost always roll over. Right?

[00:04:43] Jason, when I worked for you, I did that with Samsung all the time. They were super cool about it every time. It was like, I'll sign whatever, but I can't sign that. And I didn't mind honoring embargoes. That I understand. Yep. Yep. Jason Hiner In fact, frequently, I'm sent press releases where they just say, this is embargoed. And I'm not, you know, okay, you don't want anybody to know about this for another two days, even though no one cares. Okay, fine.

[00:05:05] Jason Hiner But sometimes they would put the word perpetuity in. It's like, they would just... I think it was boilerplate. Nobody was trying to be malicious, but they put perpetuity in. It's a long time. Jason Hiner At Tech TV, we used to have a model release form that said, really, it was awful. It said, you know, we own everything. Jason Hiner You're forever and ever on all media now existent or conceived to ever to be conceived of. Jason Hiner Yeah.

[00:05:31] Jason Hiner And I mean, I didn't make it up and I didn't care, but it seemed a little much to ask. Jason Hiner Yeah, you have to be careful with the NDAs. You know, we don't sign any embargoes, sorry, any NDAs, but we will sign loan agreements.

[00:05:45] Jason Hiner You know, occasionally. But in those NDAs, they will sometimes just put weird stuff in there. One time Nintendo tried to make a sign in a day. This is when I was at CNET. They tried to make a sign in NDA that said we couldn't upload any photos that we took before the embargo to our CMS. Jason Hiner No, but see, yeah. Jason Hiner We're like, we're not going to sign this. We're not going to sign this. Jason Hiner Yeah, we have to. Jason Hiner Samsung's always like, you have to take your briefings in a room and no one else that you live with can potentially see.

[00:06:15] Jason Hiner Yeah, we have to take your briefings in a room and see or hear them. And it's like, yeah, the people I live with, my spouse and my cats, they don't care. They truly don't care. Jason Hiner So it's like, sure, I get it. You don't want leaks. But the journalists aren't the ones doing the leaking generally. Jason Hiner You can't talk to your team. Jason Hiner That's a good point. It's usually somebody who works for the company or is contracted to the company to build the devices. Jason Hiner Yeah. Jason Hiner In fact, this Apple event on Tuesday, or I guess it was Wednesday.

[00:06:44] Jason Hiner Well, no, it was Tuesday. Jason Hiner It was Tuesday. Jason Hiner Had nothing of surprise, right? I mean, everything that they announced had already been leaked, which is kind of unusual for Apple. There was no one more thing, no surprises. Or were there? Jason Hiner Not everything. I mean, there were a lot of rumors that were wrong, too, right? A lot of stuff about the AirPods, stuff about AirPods that weren't leaked.

[00:07:04] Jason Hiner You know, there were certainly a number of things that were either leaked wrong and none of it. You know, you're never going to see Bloomberg go on and say, by the way, we were wrong about seven out of the 28 things that we had here. You know, they're never going to do that. Jason Hiner What Mark Gurman always says, and I think some of it's actually legit, is these are pre-announced products and Apple often will pull a product before it's announced. Like, they'll change their mind on it. Jason Hiner That's true.

[00:07:31] Jason Hiner Or a feature. For instance, infrared cameras supposedly might be in the AirPods. Jason Hiner Obviously, you're not going to pull that because you have to be, they've been making them for months. So whatever features are in the AirPods, the new AirPods Pros are obviously were kind of locked in months ago. Jason Hiner The reason to have the event, though, you're like, we hear lots of rumors, but the rumors don't, you know, put it in context for like, why are they doing it? Jason Hiner Exactly.

[00:07:57] Jason Hiner What's the purpose that they think, you know, these features could have? Jason Hiner And so you, it's like having a collection of parts of this to make a computer, but it doesn't run anything, right? It doesn't do anything until you actually put it together. You know, the event is where they put it together and they tell us like, this is why we're doing it. This is who we're aiming this for. This is why you think it'll make a difference. Jason Hiner There's another word for that. That's called spin. Jason Hiner Well, it's also storytelling, too.

[00:08:25] Jason Hiner Yeah, I mean, storytelling, marketing, it's all roughly the same idea, which is, here's a set of features. Here's a set of facts. Let us tell you, let us shape what that means. And to some degree, that's what the briefings are, too, is to kind of give you an idea of where Apple, what Apple's thinking is about all this. Go ahead, Dan. Dan Oh, I think it's exactly that. And Jason hit the keyword, it is context and saying,

[00:08:48] who this product is intended for. And that storytelling element is pretty important. And, you know, earned media is, even for Apple, they need earned media. What we're doing right now earns them media. Every review, every post, it will shut out their competition and earn them millions of dollars of media. All right. Jason Hiner Otherwise would have to buy.

[00:09:09] Jason Hiner So I know that Victoria is, I know you're somewhat restrained, but you can talk about the event, right? And you can check your live blogged it on the verge. Jason Hiner I did. I did do, I did have feelings and I blogged while it was happening. Jason Hiner You and Allison Johnson and Jacob Kastronakis were there.

[00:09:32] Dan Yeah, yeah. It was, it was a weird event, I'll say just because, you know, I think going in, you can assess what the thesis of the event will be. And this year was a little hard to figure out what that was. And then when we got there, and we were sitting down in the theater, it became pretty clear that the thesis was design.

[00:09:52] Jason Hiner Design They even showed a video at the beginning celebrating, you know, the click wheel and Apple's, you know, heritage of design. This, what is it, six years since Johnny Ive left the company. They're back on design.

[00:10:04] Jason Hiner I think at one point in the live blog, I couldn't, you know, promote alcoholism, but I kind of wanted to say drink if, drink if you hear the word design again, because it was just brought up so often, you know, you saw it when they were talking about the iPhone air, just everything that went into it. And, you know, the floofy, you know, interstitial movie stuff.

[00:10:29] Jason Hiner And then, you know, they talked about liquid glass and I'm of the opinion it's liquid ass. I'm not a liquid glass fan. Jason Hiner I haven't, believe it or not, I haven't heard that yet. Wow. That's somebody who hates it. Jason Hiner It just makes, it's fine, except in certain situations, you know, I've been using the beta for the last couple of months.

[00:10:54] Jason Hiner They're just situations where it becomes illegible because of how the transparency is. I find it strains my eyes over a long period of use. Other people are like, oh, maybe you should get your eyes checked. Listen, I've been very upfront that I have garbage eyeballs and that, you know, I can't use dark mode because that strains my eyes over a long period of time.

[00:11:16] Jason Hiner I'm stuck with light mode, even though dark mode is much cooler looking. I'm sure that a lot of people find the transparency effect really cool. I have a harder time reading and I get annoyed. Jason Hiner There's absolutely no question it reduces accessibility. And the good news is there is a switch. You can turn it off. I agree with you. I don't think I have garbage eyeballs, but I agree with you.

[00:11:42] Jason Hiner It does not enhance legibility. Let's put it that way. It's more, it's sizzle, more sizzle than steak. Jason Hiner Yeah. Jason Hiner Yeah. And it feels like a lot of the whole thing was like orange. It's orange. So, you know, we're talking about design that way. Jason Hiner I like your strawberry sweater, but it's orange. Jason Hiner Yes. So I'm not an orange lover, but every once in a while, there'll be something that's orange that I will accept. And, you know, with the leaks for the iPhone Pro Max or the Pro Series,

[00:12:12] Jason Hiner I was looking at the orange in the leaks and I was like, oh no, it's looking like a doo-doo brown kind of orange. Jason Hiner Yeah. Yeah. We didn't know what the orange was. People were saying, oh no, that's going to be copper. It's going to be more muted because Apple's not traditionally a bright color. Certainly not on the Pro devices. Jason Hiner It's certainly not. Jason Hiner It's very orange. Jason Hiner It's extremely orange. It's a pumpkin spice orange. It's not a sorbet orange. Jason Hiner Oh, please don't say it's pumpkin spice. Oh no. Jason Hiner By the way, I ordered orange. I even have an orange case. I am ready. I am going all orange.

[00:12:43] Jason Hiner It's an autumnal orange. So like a very nice, deep orange. Jason Hiner It's pretty. It's not like biohazard. Jason Hiner It's pumpkin spice. It's just pumpkin. Jason Hiner It's pumpkin orange. It's not biohazard orange. It's not going to like burn your eyeballs out, but it seemed pretty divisive online. Jason Hiner Sure. Jason Hiner Sorry, sorry. Jason Hiner You have an orange chair. You must like orange. Jason Hiner The orange sweater. Like we've got all kinds of like- Jason Hiner It's a little bit of a picture.

[00:13:11] Jason Hiner Maybe Dan's under embargo too. You know, Jason. Jason Hiner That's a hint. Jason Hiner That's right. Jason Hiner That's right. Jason Hiner That's right. Jason Hiner Easter eggs. So- Jason Hiner Go ahead. Sorry. Jason Hiner The event, usually we don't see what happens at the Apple campus. There was outside by the rainbow stage or was it inside? Jason Hiner It was inside the space. Jason Hiner Were you there too, Jason? Jason Hiner I was. Jason Hiner Oh, okay. Jason Hiner Yeah. Jason Hiner Dan, were you there? Jason Hiner No. Jason Hiner No.

[00:13:38] Jason Hiner I mean, I write for Jason every two months, but I haven't been a journalist for a minute. Jason Hiner I've never been a journalist. So there you go. So it was inside the Steve Jobs Theater? Jason Hiner Yes. Jason Hiner Oh, okay. That's nice. Jason Hiner Yeah. Jason Hiner They didn't let us too close to the campus. Jason Hiner It's before you go in, right? Jason Hiner They don't let us too close to the circle. Jason Hiner Right. Jason Hiner A little bit. Jason Hiner Well, did you get the golf cart treatment? Jason Hiner Because Victoria got the golf cart.

[00:14:08] Jason Hiner I did get the golf cart. Jason Hiner Okay. Jason Hiner Yeah. Jason Hiner Did you have music on your golf cart? Jason Hiner No, I didn't have any music on my Jason Hiner And I only had music in the golf cart at Dub Dub. I didn't have any music this time. I feel like Dub Dub gets the fancier golf carts. This could just be my memory playing tricks, but I'm pretty sure when we were on the golf carts at Dub Dub, I was like, Jason Hiner Yeah. And I think there are speakers around the actual spaceship. There are speakers. Jason Hiner Like Disneyland. There's speakers in the bushes.

[00:14:36] Jason Hiner There are speakers in the bushes for sure. Jason Hiner That's hysterical. Jason Hiner For sure. Yeah, yeah. Jason Hiner So, okay, you're sitting here. I have some of your pictures, Victoria. You're sitting in the beautiful Steve Jobs Theater with, I've got to say this, the awe-dropping logo of the Apple looked like it was pretty hot, which is not what you want in a phone, but I guess they wanted to tout the vapor cooling. I don't know why they did that. Sarah Honestly, I didn't know what was awe-dropping about the event. Because usually, you know,

[00:15:06] the fans go and they think about what does the tagline of the event mean? And sometimes it makes a lot of sense. Sometimes like the time flies event spring forward, you can kind of go, ah, I see it. I don't really know what the awe-dropping was. Because I was like, why not just call it jaw-dropping? Jason Hiner Under-aude. Jason Hiner Yeah. Marketing definitely came up with that one. It was like, this is like the proper title would have been, it would have been like a little bit more than

[00:15:36] incremental, you know, would have been probably, but they're never going to use that. That's why they don't hire me to do their marketing. Jason Hiner But next year is supposed to be the little bit more than just a little bit more. Jason Hiner Or is it in two years? Next year? Jason Hiner Well, there's going to be, we think, a folding phone and we'll get to the slim phone because I think the ear is kind of a preak. It's like the John the Baptist to the Jesus phone. And then, excuse me, excuse the, I apologize,

[00:16:02] the heresy. And then, and then the year after will be even more awe-dropping because that'll be the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. And so. Jason Hiner Yeah. Completely invisible. Like you won't even see it. Jason Hiner Yeah. It'll float. It'll literally float. This one didn't float. Jason Hiner That's like you just give Apple a thousand dollars. Jason Hiner So Victoria, there were a lot of influencers at the event. Yes, this was, Apple's gotten more and more focused on influencers over, over reporters, I would guess.

[00:16:31] Heather Hiner Oh, yes. There was, so there's the annual walk down the spiral staircase. You know, reporters generally get there early. There's a little light snacks around because you were going to be running around to get a hands-on right after this thing. Jason Hiner And you know you're a reporter because you pull out that little spiral bound reporter's notebook, right? And you, and a pen or pencil behind your ear and you'll lift them like that. Heather Hiner I'm pretty analog. So I do have those things. I do have like a big A5. Jason Hiner Good on you. Heather Hiner Good on you.

[00:17:00] Heather Hiner But you know, usually when I first started going to these events, maybe four or five years ago, I don't remember. They all blur together, but you know, you'd go down. It was pretty brisk because everyone's like, I need to get my seat. I need to be well positioned for the live blog. I need to get the perfect angle for the photo. Jason Hiner Are the seats reserved or? Heather Hiner No, it's a free for all. Jason Hiner It's like Southwest Airlines. You have to. Heather Hiner Yeah. That's right. Heather Hiner It's first come first serve. So, you know, you have some reporters who are just like

[00:17:25] hawks. They know they have like a sixth sense of when, when the descent is going to begin. And so they kind of hang around the staircases. Heather Hiner Oh, so there's the, the doors open. Are there velvet ropes? What, how do they signal? Heather Hiner I'm never at the, at the front because my, my priority is getting to the hands-on. So I sit at the back on purpose. I'm not trying to get to the front. Heather Hiner Oh, smart. You want to get it. Heather Hiner Same. Heather Hiner See, just like Southwest, you, you want to sit up close to the exit so you can be off the plane. Heather Hiner Yeah.

[00:17:55] Heather Hiner Quick. Got it. Heather Hiner Yeah. But you know, with each subsequent year that I've been going, there's more and more selfie sticks being held up. Heather Hiner I'm here in a themed job theater. Heather Hiner Yeah. Cause everyone's going to be like, come with me while I go to the iPhone launch event. Here we are walking down the thing. And you'd see them doing the, making the content as you go painstakingly slow down. Heather Hiner You know, you're just like, oh my God, let me just let me go. Heather Hiner You said there was somebody dancing?

[00:18:25] Heather Hiner There was an influencer. She, you know, was just kind of doing a thing where she had her. I was just watching her fascinated because she had her phone and she was just going like. Heather Hiner Oh, she's dancing to this like invisible music that I know she's going to edit. Heather Hiner She's going to edit. Heather Hiner Yeah.

[00:18:41] Heather Hiner And she just did a whole thing getting the shot. I was watching her and I was like, oh, I'm just here trying to get my Wi-Fi on my laptop. You're doing a whole production over there. And then in the hands on, she was doing the same kind of thing. And I'm sure that's just for her audience. And to make that sort of content.

[00:18:59] Heather Hiner But it's interesting to see these events that were pretty much geared towards media to start discourse in the history of tech journalism, as far as I've had a career, kind of get co-opted. Heather Hiner I don't know if co-opted is the right word, but just to see influencers have a bigger seat at the table and in many cases get prioritized was really interesting. Heather Hiner I think the Made by Google event about a month ago was like a really, that was a really interesting change.

[00:19:30] Heather Hiner The Jimmy Fallon event. Heather Hiner The Jimmy Fallon. Yeah, I was at that event as well in the front row and I was just like, what is happening? Heather Hiner This is terrible. Heather Hiner I feel like I'm in an episode of WandaVision and I just like something is uncanny and something is wrong. And it's because that event was not for me. It was not for the nerds. It was not for the pixel gadget lovers.

[00:19:53] Heather Hiner Yeah, I would argue that was maybe not for, that was produced by people who did not think about who this is for. Heather Hiner It was for nobody. Heather Hiner Yeah. Heather Hiner Yeah, and you know somebody different, you know, I said this to some Google people and it was for someone different and I went who and they went just different. Heather Hiner Rug emoji. Heather Hiner They're trying to reach the normies and they don't want to say normies because that's insulting, but that's what they're trying to do is reach normies. Heather Hiner But like.

[00:20:21] apple i think fallon no yeah right i think mistake uh i said this during the pre-show and i'll just repeat it here for the larger audience but i vix reporting guided me through and jason's as well but guided me through especially the iot portions of this event in large part because her reporting is authentic and it's honest and youtube was loaded with those ridiculous influencers some

[00:20:48] are fantastic some are just reading the press release in fact the vast majority uh of youtubers i saw were just reading off a press release it was very difficult to tell the to have insights into the event and the products and to say you know what jason said a few moments ago the context to put this into context who are these products for what story is being told and is this something that is um amazing or is this like victoria in your reporting

[00:21:18] is this within the context of iot or health or something that is maybe very good for you but but not like jaw dropping odd dropping as somebody in our chat room said it was not dropping not dropping nah i mean hypertension uh as far as the watches go the hypertension feature is an interesting one it they i got just got yesterday FDA approval for that so yeah they just got FDA clearance for that

[00:21:46] um which that's good the watches will ship with it so but by the way you don't have to buy a new watch right or do you no you don't have to um it'll come back to the series 9 and ultra 2 or later uh because it does rely on the updated optical sensor and it's an interesting feature because it's basically negating the need to have uh one of those inflatable cuffs in order to calibrate which is generally how

[00:22:13] these smartwatch or wearable versions of these blood pressure features go and it was like particularly interesting to me because whoop which is another wearable that screenless wearable they really pride themselves in in-depth health metrics they also introduced a blood pressure insights feature recently and they got slapped on the wrist by the FDA because they were like oh you didn't actually get clearance for this feature and you need to get clearance for this feature because what you're

[00:22:40] doing is diagnostic adjacent yeah and they went back and forth on it whoop is claiming that it's wellness like the w word i say because wellness does not require regulatory um oversight whereas something that's diagnostic adjacent medical adjacent will apple's very good at skirting that they know exactly what to say to be not a medical device because that requires a higher standard it's actually

[00:23:07] we one of our hosts steve gibson is in his youth wrote software furnace for a sphygma mammometer those things that's this cuffs that squeeze you it's very difficult to actually measure uh blood pre intermittent blood pressure because you have to measure in between the beats is it's very complicated it's not something a watch could ever do you have to have a compression cuff to do that accurately so what apple's really doing is is looking at signals over a period of a month right it's a long period of

[00:23:36] time it's 30 days it's 30 days you need 14 days of data from that uh 30 days i believe that it only takes daytime readings as well so it's not reading overnight and it's not going to give you direct readings or any you're never going to get your blood pressure from it you're never going to get your blood pressure from it um what it's doing is it's basically uh comparing your signals and the data that it's getting from you to a uh baseline derived from like a very large data set i think machine

[00:24:05] learning right it says yeah learning yeah we take these people with hypertension and we see what we get from them and we compare it to yours and hmm but even then it's not diagnostic it's it's a warning it's like maybe you should check your blood pressure that kind of it's it's it's what we call a detection feature and it's sort of like a it's like a flag it's going like hey uh something's a little

[00:24:28] bit off here so maybe go talk to your medical provider and in the world of wearable and health tech that's kind of the limitations that's the best you can do that's the best you can do because none of these companies want the liability of diagnosing you with something and being wrong right so that's why more importantly missing something we're missing something like they don't want to be in trouble

[00:24:51] for uh killing you giving you a like basically they don't want to give you a false negative right and then you get blamed for that so most of them when they're designing their features will gear towards um not delivering false positives this is probably as good as you're ever going to get from a watch i know you're an aura ring fan uh they don't attempt to do this um yeah maybe uh airpods could get a better look because they're because of the positioning in your ear but you're never going to

[00:25:21] get a blood pressure reading from this however hypertension is a silent killer they give you a blood pressure reading yeah there was one by omron that i tested a couple years ago and what it does is that um i use their sphygmum monitor but that's the cuff so they make a watch huh they made they made a watch uh it did get fda clearance uh the difference was that there was an inflatable oh there's a cuff oh yeah so there's an inflatable wristband in there and it squeezes you okay so

[00:25:47] you know that's how they so they do use a cuff that's how they do it at the the the holy grail with all of these wearable technologies is non-invasive yeah so you know non-invasive blood pressure estimates or non-invasive um blood glucose monitoring which i don't care what bloomberg says that's not coming anytime soon i agree talked to the diabetes it's not going to happen you have to test the blood anytime soon yeah they've been working on non-invasive blood glucose monitoring technology

[00:26:16] since 1975 we're like 50 years since not to sell apple short though because i mean they showed that video of all the people who are you know underwater in his car and the apple watch saved his life and all that stuff the apple watch has very clear health benefits but for sure it's not a diagnostic tool uh the afib may be a little more accurate perhaps than the blood pressure but it's still not

[00:26:44] diagnostic it's not diagnostic it's they call it as detection so they're never going to tell you what it is it's like back when um the pandemic was in full swing in 2020 you had a bunch of these wearable companies and researchers partnering together to try and see if they could detect infectious illnesses um here we are five years later and the main there's some version of that feature in the aura ring called

[00:27:09] symptom radar but it's very uh how do you say generic and they won't even say that it's illness they'll say there is an early sign that your health is changing yeah i got one the other day i got one the other day my my temperature body temperature was up a degree over the average and that actually that's why i started wearing the core or us during covid hoping that it would catch it early it never

[00:27:33] did so and i wasn't sick my body was hot i guess i don't know in the developing world for for several years like five years now they've been taking they've been doing something similar going back to hypertension and blood pressure where you take your your finger and you put it on your camera and it can do enough right to give you some indication of like you should go yeah and and do it yeah

[00:27:56] exactly a lot of it's on samsung phones even even like 200 phones with not like the best cameras um with cameras from like 2019 you know can can do that and it's as good as is what you know is is in uh apple but the difference where we're at now and aura is a good example of this is that how can you take that health data and use it to give you some actionable insights right to tell you to do something this is

[00:28:24] where apple still has a lot of work to do because apple will give you apple health will give you a ton of different individual insights on each you know on each of these different things but doesn't necessarily take them together you know look at algorithms over and machine learning over time you know or uh and and some of the other uh smart rings as well ultra human um and and some of the others they are they are doing a better job of this right of like taking these things and turn them into actionable

[00:28:52] insights of like you might want to consider doing x and so um i was hoping we'd see more of that in um watch os you know the new version of watch os and or the new apple watches we didn't although we did get a sleep score you know that that that is a step in the right direction but um it's still uh it's still a bit of a challenge the software stuff and the ai you know and machine learning parts um you know apple's

[00:29:18] moving very kind of slowly and deliberately there i think on purpose i think some of it is a talent thing yeah yeah i appreciate it because i've tested a lot of the ai companions and insights in these fitness apps that have rolled out over the past year and they're hot they're bad they're not good like i think the only one i'm moderately cautiously optimistic about is google's ai health coach

[00:29:44] just because you know i had a chance to talk with the execs behind it um after the made by pixel event and they seemed very thoughtful about what the implementation was going to be so i'm cautiously optimistic to test it because you know the fluff that comes beforehand is fluff you won't really know until you get to try it but um the ones that i've seen from aura the ones that i've seen from garmin and strava they're just captain obvious book report with digitators where it's like here's your here's

[00:30:12] your data you ran fast yeah job faster than your job it's it's i'm just repeating the data that's in the chart wow thank you um amazing yay yay so i kind of um i i actually kind of appreciate that apple is not over promising in this respect but to your point they are behind so it can often feel like they are

[00:30:37] either moving glacially slow or just like not innovating in the space being maybe perhaps overly cautious and even in the design of the sleep score like if you actually look into it it's kind of designed in an interesting way and that it's not based on your biometrics at all like a lot of what aura does will like they'll take into consideration your heart rate variation they'll take

[00:31:02] into consideration your sleep stages and whatnot that that particular score from apple is built around um kind of factors that you can control like how long did you sleep you can kind of control that when you go to bed you can kind of control that i always look at i don't know if it's meaningful i always look at my uh rem and deep sleep numbers is that meaningful i mean is it accurate i guess is it accurate is

[00:31:28] yeah accuracy is the big question so you know aura is very dedicated to communicating their science i believe they're around 80 percent uh in terms of accuracy correlation with the gold standard sleep polysomnography but it's still only 80 percent so um wearables are a lot better at telling when you fall asleep and when you wake up the sleep stages that's kind of and it's also not within your

[00:31:54] control that's not anything you can do it's only something you can monitor and go like wow yeah they always try to correlate it to behaviors during the day like were you stressed did you drink a lot of coffee that kind of stuff i don't find light late at night you know yeah i don't i don't find it all that valuable but i it is it does gamify my sleep like i'm always trying to get a little crown over my sleep score so still we didn't get a ton of i think what we didn't get is a ton of that kind of stuff at this

[00:32:23] at this event you know to victoria's point earlier they really retrenched to this design and hardware mindset and really reading between the lines one of the things that's been interesting over the last couple years um from apple is you know the last two years have been uh 23 and 24 have been like a vision pro and an apple intelligence story and really where in both cases they're like out of their comfort zone

[00:32:48] right yeah and so they were not what when i sort of say reading between the lines like i look at the way they talk about things both on stage and then off stage and there are ways that the last two years they were not very confident right like when when i was working on stuff they would be emailing me a lot of times like what do you think how did it go you know right yeah checking in what would you you know how's the testing coming along so they were they were just not super confident about it this event

[00:33:15] they were so confident that they were dropping shade on other people like okay they're really they're really confident so for example you know when they talked about photography for uh the their phone they said you know in our uh in our phones we've made it uh clear we use machine learning do a lots of things computational photography we're doing lots of things but when you take a picture with our phones

[00:33:39] we actually want it to be of a real person and we will actually want it to be based in reality not made up you know and so clearly they were dropping shades straight at google on some of the um you know they're they are dropping shade they are a lot more confident they're not asking me what do you think about that feature there they were um coming out in confidence like they're very confident in their

[00:34:06] photography they're very confident in the design of their products they're very confident in uh you know adding uh hardware that makes them sort of the most advanced as they would call it right the most advanced hardware you can find in earbuds and phones and and watches so they were much more in their comfort zone in this event and i think that i think it did show in some of the the products uh you know some of the things that they they leaned into will the the consumers will consumers respond to it

[00:34:36] i think that in one sense they're a little closer to where the consumer is because i don't think ai is driving a lot of purchases um now it drives wall street big time um and that's why you know apple got downgraded by wall street analysts after this event because they didn't talk about ai and all the ai features they were uh they were announcing but i do feel like you look at the the the shipping dates

[00:35:00] of some of their products which got pushed out later and later into october um they did resonate pretty well with consumers and i i think that that part you know they they hit the right notes that they needed to hit to you know sell products and get uh get the right kinds of products in the people's hands that want them that want to buy their their stuff jason confidence is key i'm sorry victor no i'm just

[00:35:24] saying that's like a really um kind of astute observation about this conflict between what the consumer wants and what the investor wants and then also like if you hear the way that apple has talked about apple intelligence a lot of the times people i talk to say it's about meeting the consumer where they're at and some of that you could say is yes they're behind they have to play catch up they don't really have super impressive things to show for that so it's very easy to say it's about meeting

[00:35:50] the consumer where they're at and what they need but and on the other flip side it's true like as a company they are much more about the now and what they do well especially in this event and especially if you look at the airpods right because they're like we have the we have the airpods everybody loves the freaking airpods and so we've decided to make the airpods even more airpod great world's best a and c asterisk in an earbud like that's just like the stuff that was being said at this particular

[00:36:18] event but then you look at some place like google and they're just like ai is the future it's not apple may have dodged a bullet by being behind on ai maybe it actually is people don't care as much and i think there's a little bit of a pendulum swing on ai i know investors care oh actually humans are caring less and less i think well look consumer sentiment on ai business sentiment business still is hot on ai but consumer sentiment on ai dried up in april may june yeah and it really

[00:36:47] is not it i think apple was very smart going into dub dub they could read the room and i think jason confidence really is the key word when it comes to this event you could see that forecast six or eight weeks ago when some of the leaks started happening although we joke about apple leaks and it's kind of something that happens every year this happened earlier it was hardware focused and was very key what the products were they were apple's core not just competency but competency right

[00:37:14] iphone airpods apple watch those things move units for consumers they make human beings happy business can focus on the dub dub events and maybe right they might have dodged a bullet i really think that i don't think i know because i see the data that comes from large analyst firms that consumers don't trust ai companies and they're kind of increasingly so increasingly and that doesn't mean dogging them i'm just saying what the data says and probably apple reacting to it and saying you know what

[00:37:43] next year and the year after are going to be interesting years for us we will release highly anticipated products this year we double down if people want ai we've got ai but we don't have to be open ai we don't have to be anthropic you know um you know embargoes are embargoes but if you were just looking at on paper as to what the announcements were and what actually is the stuff where you read between the lines and you go like actually that's the cool thing it's not the orange phone it's not the

[00:38:13] air it's the base iphone 17. it's the apple watch se 3 and it's the air parts the less expensive products the less expensive problem products like the apple watch se has always just been like it's cheap watch but if you look at everything that they added to the apple watch se3 i walked out of that theater going like you know what was not on my bingo card the apple watch se3 being the absolute best upgrade of the year to all three of the watches i wonder if that's an economic indicator too that

[00:38:43] consumers right we have to take it we have to take a break we're way behind and i have so much to talk about i do want to know what you think of the little skinny phone the air and uh and a lot more what a panel this is great jason heiner editor-in-chief at zd net and he was at the apple event so was victoria song she's senior reviewer at the verge always wonderful to get both of you on and my dear friend dan patterson from blackbird ai uh and a long time newsman you still write for zd net so

[00:39:12] that's not yeah it's still right i will still in the family i will be a journalist when i'm when i'm dead i will not have most still have deadlines uh great to have all three of you we'll have more in just a bit our show today brought to you by express vpn going online without express vpn i don't know it's like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom most of the time you know fine but what if one day you come out of the bathroom and your laptop's gone

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[00:42:30] jason heiner there is a little ai in the new air pods they've got that translation sorry though can we boost uh victoria's uh mic a little bit yeah victoria you're a little low if you can oh we just want to hear your i'll just sit closer to my mic my couch is real deep yeah don't get relaxed so anyway yeah i mean if you have if you have if you have a little bit more gain to put on your there's a knob is there a knob anywhere uh there's a no oh on that maybe on your system on your on your on your

[00:42:59] zoom there's a i don't want to get too much in the weeds on this move the mic as close to you as you can i think yeah just i think yeah as long as you move it closer to your face that's probably gonna work yeah okay cool thanks back to our panel dan patterson victoria song dan dan heiner jason heiner hi jason uh the airpods have a little bit of uh ai in them with this uh simultaneous translation in fact if both people are wearing a pods they said you'd be able to talk to each other not

[00:43:28] available in any country outside the us it looks like i don't know it's not available in europe i think not available uh in other countries as well but you you weren't able to get a demo of this victoria i did get a demo i did get a demo at apple park oh both of you did okay let's hear about it so basically they had a bunch of us in a room and they showed they had someone come in speak spanish

[00:43:53] to us and then we got to listen to the airpods translate it and it did a pretty good job i must say uh but i'm very skeptical about uh translation tech in general just because i lived abroad for seven years i went to college in japan and then worked there for a couple years afterwards i live in a multi-family uh multilingual family and uh you know it's one thing to be in a demo with guardrails

[00:44:19] and to have a little speech that they've thought up ahead of time and they're talking in a very measured tone and uh very that's not how real people talk is it that's not how real people talk if you listen to a podcast if you watch the movie you know um a lot of us children of immigrants have an auntie that speaks at the speed of light and um you know at least in my family we speak something called conglish

[00:44:46] where you switch between korean and english in the same sentence back and forth it's more like a pigeon or creole type situation uh a lot of the different ai translation uh devices or features that i've tested really struggle with that um you know pixel also introduced uh ai live translation calls and i tested

[00:45:09] that with my very lovely uh colleague allison and oh boy did we make the robot scream i think we broke it uh on the call uh it just google even changes the voices which apple does not do right no it doesn't do that but you know the pixel was just going ah um or allison speaking in japanese to me via this feature was going at and then i think i actually broke it because you know my japanese a little

[00:45:36] rusty i haven't lived there in a decade but so you know i was trying to think of words and trying to to to think of grammar on the fly because sometimes when you're talking to someone who you know speaks english your brain does a little glitchy glitch and it doesn't know what language it's supposed to be speaking in in that given context or time and you know um so a lot of times when i test this uh kind

[00:46:00] of technology there's i mean lord knows the humane ai pin just was really racist to me uh that was that was that was something racist what do you mean um i was asking it things in japanese and it just like repeated gibberish back to me and i was like okay that's weird um and then you know the pixel uh one of the one of the things that i noticed with the pixel call uh was that i was asking about breakfast

[00:46:25] and or allison was asking me what i had eaten for breakfast and they used the word choshoku choshoku is like a very uh formal word for breakfast you'll see it in menus and you'll see it written no one's speaking to each other in japanese will use that word they'll use asa gohan which is the more common uh word for breakfast and the ai used choshoku which i was like i would only expect to hear that maybe at a hotel talk to me by a staff who's using super respectable form of the language or in a menu

[00:46:55] so i was kind of thrown off by that usage in the in the translation and you know those are the kind of nuances that ai translation devices um kind of you know they quote unquote get lost in translation with so um i think but at least you would understand what they were saying i mean at least the gist yeah i think it's useful for for tourists like if you're a tourist and you're like i have no idea how

[00:47:22] much this costs how much does this cost and someone tells you and you can have that kind of conversation that's great because honest to god duolingo exists but i don't necessarily want to use duolingo for a place that i'm only going to visit for two weeks and i have no interest in like further and deep diving deep into that culture versus a place that i'm really interested in and i do want to study that language and that culture the ai is not quite as helpful there but if you're

[00:47:48] just visiting a place and you're like i'm so lower expectations it's not the babel fish it's it's going to help you get around i want the babel fish but well we all want it but i don't know if we're going to get it anytime soon here's what i did well i i've similar experience like the there have been promises of this in tech for 10 years right yeah google's been announcing this at google io for at least 10 years they've announced it every year right every year 2015 so and i'm also testing the you know pixel

[00:48:17] 10 pro excel and the pixel with the pixel buds 2 and trying it there and every week so i do some volunteer work with um mostly teenagers in literacy it speaks teenager now that would be that would be amazing yeah i'd like that translation um but so in multiple different languages spanish um french swahili wow good on you wall of uh yeah several others so so i get the chance to test some of these

[00:48:44] in the real world um i so the demo i had the same demo that victoria mentioned um it's largely similar to most of the other demos now here's one thing that i think that impressed me uh which is that in these demo not when not the demos but when you actually go to use the product you have to hit so many different buttons to actually get it to work that by the time wait wait wait don't say anything wait hold on hold on wait wait wait wait say that again you know it's so bad it is so it's it's like

[00:49:14] really unusable so the one thing apple's done that's very appley is they've made it a lot easier all you do is like with the air if you have airpods you just double hold with both do a long press with both buttons and it goes right into translation okay and then it starts so i did that and um in the demo and uh i was like okay that's a lot better than digging through and doing the like

[00:49:39] hold on no start again dude hold on let me hit this button and find it switch put it to the right language and all that it just doesn't work super well i have to say you're also missing a cultural opportunity with hand gestures and kind of get you know there's a for sure certain value to trying to communicate with somebody without the technology in between you know i learned from so the work that i do in literacy i learned from my friend who's an esl teacher so he's the one that sort of trained me

[00:50:08] in this and when he talks everything is hand gestures he's like okay so we're we're gonna go from here to your house um at at six o'clock um and you know so so he's sort of using the the body language to tell like 50 of the story right and and that um there's a lot of what helps this is very typical of the tech industry they see a tech solution to every thing when often it it obscures the human

[00:50:37] element and and and i think more and more we're getting uh kind of disenchanted with turning to tech for these kinds of things that you you lose out somewhat so anyway uh good apple put it in there it's probably appropriate to lower expectations it isn't the babel fish uh fine okay it only does like five languages to start they say they've got it like another five that are coming before the end of

[00:51:03] the year they've said we'll see like this stuff is not easy like even doing it at the most basic level to understand conversations is hard but but it is bad like it's better than it was 10 years ago it's better than it was two years ago so you know um so who's gonna buy well you guys don't have to buy anything but uh if you had to buy something would you buy the air who would buy the air who likes the air

[00:51:31] i'm thinking air but i wouldn't buy it i'm saying i'm wondering if the air is a non they can't sell it in europe and china because it's the sim issue yet maybe they will be able to e-sims are not regulatory approved um but i wonder how sales are going to go for the air i think apple thought it was going to be their best seller at least from the trackers you know looking at availability it's not it's not sold out by any means there's an emotional response to it so i i have no doubt they're going

[00:52:01] to sell a bunch because if you go into a store if you go into the apple store if you go into the verizon store you pick it up like it feels amazing in your hand like and you look at it like it it is it has an emotional you have an emotional response to it so i have no doubt a lot of people are going to buy it um my question is how many of them are going to regret it because you know you at the phone and

[00:52:26] victoria uh mentioned this earlier the iphone 17 is actually a better phone this year than the iphone air is the base level 17 they up they doubled the storage it essentially is a is this like a 16 pro without the the zoom camera because they all start with 256 gigs now as storage does the does this phone and and victoria's well does this phone does the air point to a future is this something that

[00:52:55] apple can start with and iterate on or is this a placeholder because they needed um something as a uh um like a highlight or a headline feature well no they didn't give it a year they didn't give it a model number it's just the iphone air right i can see i mean i think that this is i have no interest in it but i think it's very innovative and i think it's worth a shot i think i think this is because samsung has yeah it's that's kind of where i'm going and it's pretty clear this is going to be the

[00:53:24] predate the precursor for what i think that's that's what i'm getting at likely what it i think it's likely a kind of a precursor to a foldable just because you know they they're far far far behind how many foldables that we have from samsung at this is the seven seven yeah like seven of them so they're far behind and in terms of foldable and this is just kind of showing that they can make something

[00:53:48] extremely slim um and to jason's point like when you hold it you're like oh nice does it seem top heavy though i mean it's got this giant bump at the top no not not really when you hold it in your hand i was just like oh this is quite nice but the thing that gets me is the the dubious camera math that's happening where they're like this one camera is the equivalent of four cameras and i'm like wow

[00:54:13] how i'm gonna wait for the the camera nerds that i know and the the reviewers who are much better at photography than i am to kind of weigh in as to what that's actually going to be like but i don't know like you can say that it's a fusion camera and that it's four cameras in one but when i go to a concert and i want to zoom in am i going to get a potato photo versus like buying one with with

[00:54:38] with uh with more cameras and an actual telephoto lens i think that's something that people are going to have to reckon with and then the other thing with the air was like just tell me how long the battery is going to last without the battery pack they were doing some weird there was some weird like misdirection we're like well with the battery pack you'll get x amount of uh hours of playback and i was like yeah but what about without it what about just just tell me what the battery life is

[00:55:05] and they just was like yeah isn't it beautiful all day it's all day yeah all day all day all day i think it's all day if you you know how we can all tell because of the uh the things that tell you how long you use your phone and what you use if you use your phone like two and a half to three hours a day i think you'll get through a day with it that's like a somewhat sort of light to medium user if you're using your phone three to four hours a day or more you're not gonna i don't think you're

[00:55:34] gonna make it all day it's a fashion accessory and you have another phone for the daytime and air for the nighttime thousand dollars you have an extra thousand dollars for a fashion well that's why i don't think it's gonna sell that well i really don't you probably aren't working and you don't need it to go all day so yeah that's a good point or you're like me you work at home and it's always on the charger um yeah i had a battery accessory with it i think says a lot right

[00:56:01] like it has its own battery accessory with it it's a it's a concept car right ultimately i think it's a it's a bit of a concept car and i would not be surprised if it's the only iphone air and next year we get the iphone fold and it replaces it in the lineup but yeah i was surprised because we didn't get a plus phone this year it's like an iphone 17 plus instead we just have the iphone uh 17 air

[00:56:27] and i was kind of like well what about those of us who want more battery like the rumors are that apple's gonna have two phone events now because they want to smooth out manufacturer they want to smooth out the stock prices so there'll be a mid-year phone that will be an se kind of phone that's the rumor but i who knows who knows i think that uh i think what they also recognize is

[00:56:52] that if you're that serious about your phone you're going to get a pro if you care about the cameras you're going to get a pro right yeah and they much increase the battery life on the pro they basically said okay or if you want short and squat we can make we can make a good battery life phone the 17 the base level 17 is almost like a little pro now though yeah like it's got 248 megapixel cameras it's

[00:57:17] got 20 256 you know um gig base storage so that's double what the same with the con with the you know same level samsung and google phones have so it's got more storage it's got the 248 megapixel cameras it's got better battery life because of the upgraded processor higher refresh rate right it's got the higher refresh rate and that makes it feel like a fast phone right yeah and 3000 it's pretty capable

[00:57:45] yeah it is essentially a 16 pro with without the zoom lens and for 799 there i think they've figured out the cap the consumer categories and they're saying okay the certain groups want don't care about the camera as much but their battery life's important they also it's very impressive what they're doing with processors the new processor is extremely fast they kind of alluded to uh to

[00:58:11] it being as fast as a desktop computer look pro level performance it compares very well to an m4 so uh that's pretty amazing and that's a testament to apple silicon the other thing i thought was very interesting and maybe it's because they have all those influencers in the stairwell is the selfie camera they finally acknowledged that that may be the most used camera on the phone for a lot of people i love that so like when that happened in the theater i was like yes finally

[00:58:41] it's for you victoria acknowledge my vanity acknowledge my vanity um but to to that point there a lot of what actually ended up impressing me at this event were like small things like that in in like the the the grand scale of things just like oh yes that tiny thing that i asked for thank you for giving it to me uh thank you for giving me an always on display on the se3 we've only been asking for that for like

[00:59:06] six years at this point and yay we finally get it and you know better air uh better active noise cancellation on the airpods that's all anybody really wants so i i really do think it's interesting that when you look across all of the announcements what i actually think will get people jazzed and what will drive sales are these affordably priced devices that just add what people want like that selfie camera

[00:59:31] do when i see so the 17 and nothing and the se watch to you are the real products here not in the airpods 3 yeah and the airpods 3. going full circle to what jason said at the beginning of this conversation the last two years or at least two cycles were on devices that could have defined the future but they were very hypothetical and there even without bashing the decisions there was not

[01:00:00] necessarily consumer demand pointing towards uh the ai or vision pro uh and now they have come around to selling what people want and victoria you're a cross body strap kind of gal yes this is not a new this is not a new accessory no i see this all the time people walk around mostly women i don't see a lot of guys with it but uh yeah um they're super big in asia they're super big in europe i believe i bought a

[01:00:30] bandolier strap a couple years years ago because i was just like you know your phone has in many ways replaced your wallet so you know i want i don't want to carry a purse my phone could be my purse yeah just carry it this way so i had one for a while and then i graduated to um a little wristlet strap because uh wait a minute you strap your phone to your wrist like a watch oh no it's like a you've

[01:00:56] remembered the little straps on we motes so that you wouldn't like go oh yeah yeah yeah yeah i have one those like a little hand lanyard yeah yeah yeah i have a little hand lanyard because sometimes i'm just doing stuff and i want to drop my phone but i don't want to put it in a pocket because women's pants don't have pockets that are suitable for a pro max phone uh which is what i have and so you know i have a little hand lanyard on there so the hands-free aspect of keeping your phone but not having

[01:01:22] to put it in a separate other bag makes that cross body um accessory a really smart idea they have magnets so that you can kind of adjust the length and keep it secure i'm i'm just like the the etsy makers are going to be real pissed it's it's apple sure locking etsy um that at 59 i think that there will be a market for others oh i mean the bandolier strap i got was 98 dollars 100 so this is technically

[01:01:48] cheaper so yeah wow i hadn't really seen many or i hadn't really thought about it that much and then on the flight home i saw them everywhere obviously not the apple once you're aware of it but i was aware of it so i was like oh look there's one oh there's another one oh look she's got one too and i'm walking it's like i see them everywhere i'm like oh wow i guess this is a trend that i just it's a thing it's because they won't give women pockets they won't give us pockets that are big

[01:02:13] enough for our phones in women's clothing yeah there's no pockets like my my wife actually calls me pockets i'm her pocket basically and and she says always wear something where you can carry my lipstick my phone it's a conspiracy theory why do we have purses it's because they won't give us pockets in our clothes that you men have and so we have to buy all these bags but now we don't want to carry the bags because our phone is basically everything but you just don't want to carry your phone because then

[01:02:41] you're just one-handed so give me the cross-body strap man were you no air tags although we have heard a rumor that uh there might be an october event that there are at least five products apple still has to announce this year including an apple tv new home pods and air tags uh but maybe an october event the

[01:03:04] air pods pro 3 got the upgraded chip so that they now have precision finding the u u3 yeah the u2 they actually called it the u2 this year you know okay youtube before so essentially that that case is now an uh air uh the second gen air tag so i think it's probably a a tell that the next air tag is coming

[01:03:30] because that case on the air pods pro 3 has the u2 chip right in it so um so that the air pods pro to victoria's other point like the air pods pro 3 are is that's that was probably my pick for the best upgrade of the whole thing uh they when i when i did the demo of those i i almost cussed when i turned

[01:03:56] on the um when i turned on the noise cancellation i was like is it really oh how exciting they said twice as good really you've got it's it's probably better than twice as good like that's crazy it's great like we they were giving us demos in the main hands-on area that's a loud place because not only do you have hundreds of influencers and uh journalists you have tim cook mulling around there's people talking

[01:04:21] uh and so they had just like these trays of uh air pods that you could try you could try to find find the best fit stick them in and you know they would be like okay turn on the air uh turn on the noise canceling and let's play this uh playlist from the f1 soundtrack oh god when you turn on the when you turn it could have been a u2 album so you maybe you could have been worse yeah yeah but you know

[01:04:46] you turn turn on the the noise canceling and go it's yeah it's like still hear some of the higher frequencies you can still hear some of the higher frequencies but it's dead quiet and then they had me played the celine dion track from the f1 soundtrack and all i heard was the sweet dulcet tones of canada's favorite pop star and it was you know she diva i love that for myself and i was honest to god

[01:05:10] just flabbergasted your pods will go on your pods will go on yeah your pods will go on because the airpods pro 2 are good this is better like yeah one second i was like these are oh these are better wow and they fit better too they they genuinely they changed that they have now five tips and they have some foam uh enhanced tips and they say they measured 10 000 years to get them that's right the

[01:05:37] the thing that's crazy is i didn't really think you could get better uh noise cancellation in airpod i just thought it's you're only gonna be able to get so good and i've tried other ones the sony xm5 earbuds are really good too they're they're about as good as that the airpods pro twos so i just was like i i just don't know how good could they really get but these are like 80 not to 90 as good as

[01:06:03] airpods max like that's how good they are and and um i that sort of blows my mind because on long trips you still like i still have to use it over the ear over the ear the bose quiet comforts or something yeah because you know just for battery life and for the fact that it's for the loud plane sound save your ears yeah the only thing that's gonna well i'm going on a plane in a couple of weeks and i will try the airpods 3 we don't get review units we don't do embargoes so our reviews will be coming

[01:06:32] out micah sargent and i will both have new iphones i'll have the new ultra 3 watch the airpods pro 3 uh like everybody else next week and um we'll have our reviews following that yeah but here's what you think i'm sure pretty wild zd net and the verge will have their reviews as soon as they are able who can say who can say apparently not you i can't say a damn thing

[01:07:01] i didn't know but keep an eye out but keep an eye peeled yeah keep an eye out sometime soon sometime very i can say this typically the wednesday before friday ship date for the iphones and i would imagine the other stuff will be in that general range so remember that they tend to they just as a tip i think you had the general timing of what last year's right bargos looked like and

[01:07:29] remember that they do them one day at a time so like go a day backward you know in terms of what history looks like the last few years the embargo for you know the watch and the airpods tend to be a day or two before the good phone based on history based on anything that you know anything you would possibly know um let's take a break we have done we're done with apple thank god oh my god that was an

[01:07:58] hour of apple talk but you know what sorry dan thanks for your patience it's still like the number one consumer product out there i think it's still pretty close to it certainly drives more than half of apple's sales and they are nearly a four trillion dollar company so i guess we had to talk about them okay but we're going to move on we're going to talk about google and the web which is apparently according to google in rapid decline when we continue uh you are you are watching

[01:08:27] this week in tech victoria song is here senior reviewer from the verge dan patterson of blackbird ai and news.danpatterson.com is that a newsletter or just a website it's just my but yeah it's my subsec and it's fine i like if you want to put something up i write a column for jason quarterly or every two months i think nice um let's send people to zd net yeah let's go to zd net they'll

[01:08:56] probably have a bunch of reviews up there soon uh editor-in-chief and if you would like to read about geopolitical swings caused by narrative attacks and disinformation you can read my stuff it's actually we're going to talk about nepal what's going on in nepal is oh that's a lot of fun all right we go from iphone fun i don't know but now you're talking my language leo it's wild and this week

[01:09:21] there have been a number of calls uh for you know banning social media i mean yeah we've been covering this for a year it's yeah it's been pretty nuts yeah is social media a hazard i don't know we'll talk about that and more i quit social media a long time ago yeah i don't like it and it was and i did a podcast in 2018 where we both said that we were retiring from social media yeah did you keep it up i don't use i mean this is a longer story i try very very hard i have a

[01:09:48] blue sky account that i like but i don't post to i try very hard not to post the social and also try not to scroll once a week i check in on accounts but my twitter account got elon so i can't use that part of my job is to actually even look at x as well as blue sky and sure i can't even log in i'm prevented from creating new accounts good so any anything that i create i'm sure i'm not choking you're like i can't i walked into my twitter one day and it said you are a hazard to

[01:10:16] the twitter community and you're kidding no i'll say that's a bad i'll send you a screenshot right now you're a hazard to the twitter not a hazard but like because of we've examined your posts and we've found that blah blah blah but that's where you know i don't even i don't post there but i do have a blog which cross posts to his you know it's you know i really don't want to get into elon stuff or or nonsense about about that website i mean it just turns into a rabbit hole but uh when dan and

[01:10:43] i did that um podcast in 2018 because dan and i met on social media we couldn't even really remember when or where but you know i had calculated i was spending like two to three hours a day on social media yeah and so i was like okay this has got to stop so i said i'm gonna i'm gonna limit it to like 15 minutes a day to check in on things occasionally so occasionally i post on linkedin or or uh instagram still but i pretty much kept this up so what i said at the time was for a year

[01:11:09] and i'm gonna take that two to three hours a day that i was spending and i'm gonna trade that for two things um i'm going to read books because i realized it had been two years since i had read a book which is shameful to say so i'm gonna read books much better use of your time and um i mean they were still digital books they were kindle you know i wasn't filling up my shelves okay or audio books and audio books and then i'm gonna spend the time i'm gonna actually meet because i realized that

[01:11:35] i also had like kind of stopped meeting my friends in real life so i said i'm gonna i'm gonna go out to lunch or do phone calls with people instead like a smaller group of people but you know i'm gonna do that for a year and after a year my like i felt so much i felt so much better connected i felt so much like my mental health felt so much better and i was like there's i didn't even think about the date because it was sometime in the summer of 2018 when dan and i did that and i didn't even think

[01:12:03] about when the date came because there was no way i was going to go back and stop you know doing it so i really have just kind of kept that going you know seven years you've been doing that jason that's tremendous yeah for sure you missed a lot 22. that's so wholesome i'm not involved like that yet i i'm i'm still doom scrolling on tiktok because oh i won't yeah there's so much good beef on there

[01:12:29] and i just like oh it's so tasty where is the beef yeah i find friends like you who then tell me the stuff that i missed that's my wife's job i carry her stuff around in my pocket and she tells me what's going on on social it's perfect it's a good match marriage made in heaven there you go we will continue in just a moment yeah i can't even log in i love that you've been banned is amazing you that's what a badge of honor a badge of honor for sure what did you say sure i didn't say anything but i did have

[01:12:57] an account where i i mean i'm not going to go into this rabbit hole but i was actively covering uh the acquisition of twitter in uh for cba i mean i was on air every single day 9 000 times a day talking about the acquisition never disparaging ever never i would never say something disparaging on air or off air well off air yeah but um or on our show but no i would never disparage ever ever ever i mean

[01:13:21] very good about that you're very good about that i got a uh honorary blue check i and i don't even post so but it lets me use grok for free so that's good i took it did uh i mean i jason i think you and i didn't want a blue check they forced it down my throat they took it away i was in the audio beta pay for it i'm never going to pay for oh i wouldn't pay for it but they i don't want people to think i paid for it i'm like cory doctorow his his handle says non-consensual blue check i remember

[01:13:51] i am a non-consensual i did buy a black though let me show you this oh you know what he turned me on to libra.fm which i used to buy his new book oh nice uh when elon bought twitter they uh somebody clever on put this up on uh on etsy and i just i had to buy it it's a little it's a little plaque honoring it says in honor of leo laporte who had a verified twitter account before they were available

[01:14:19] for purchase oh my god i wish i had that and note the date ever the date of elon's acquisition november 2022 oh wow and so i did and then he bought it and it disappeared and then it's mysteriously reappeared and i don't even did they started sending some people back they never sent mine back for sure either i don't think it's an honor in any way so let's take a break i've been trying to take a break

[01:14:46] for 15 minutes and we're gonna take one now gosh darn it because we got all these great advertisers and uh you know we got a great panel too i hate to stop we'll get right back to the panel in a sec but first a word from our sponsor this week in tech brought to you this week by bitwarden the trusted leader in password paskey and even secrets management bitwarden is consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction you'll see it on g2 you'll see it in software reviews more than 10 million users

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[01:19:56] uh google and especially the ai assistant that that's not hurting web traffic effect web traffic's thriving they didn't want to lie in court uh last week in a court filing google admitted the open web is already in rapid decline um this is in the trial the department of justice uh has our remember

[01:20:23] they lost two monopoly trials one last year and got a little teeny weeny slap on the wrist from judge ahmet mehta just a little slap on the wrist uh but there is still another one the doj got one a victory uh the judge agreed google is a monopoly in advertising department of justice is asking that the judge break up google's advertising business the company's response says it's not ideal

[01:20:49] because it would only accelerate the decline of the open web but but wait google you said everything was fine i'm sure jason you must i don't know maybe you don't want to talk about it but you must see this the the the ai summaries uh and so forth they've got to be hitting traffic yes for sure and

[01:21:13] ai is a part of the story but this has also been an ongoing story playing out over a number of years which is that google is more and more incented to not send you out outside of google but to keep you on google's pages right so yeah that's the that's the bigger story and that's what you know google's not

[01:21:35] gonna say um and i think ai certainly is having a an accelerating impact on that because it's the the answers are not very good but um but they are sometimes good enough right and so they are good enough to to let you get the information you need and not leave google so you could say in some cases it's like a better user experience if you're going to google not to um you know go and find out a place

[01:22:03] that you want to go to get the information that you trust but just to like get a quick answer on something which plenty of people are okay great maybe they get a better experience by by just going to google and getting that quick answer um but where there are uh also plenty of opportunities for people to that want to go to google not they don't want the information in an ai overview right they

[01:22:25] they want to go out to some place they trust to to see it so that my my beef is is as much that google is sometimes making it harder to do that right like harder to see where's the information from like i think even some of the other um competitors in ai search like um uh especially uh especially um some of the

[01:22:50] non-open ai ones um open ai also is wanting to keep you in open ai's ecosystem but perplexity um and uh and claude from anthropic they are a little bit better at showing you like in parentheses here's where it is or click it and you see the sources when i see something in one of those ai searches like i'm looking at the sources and then i'm going to to verify it now i'm a journalist i know not everybody

[01:23:16] thinks that way but i do think that um that there are plenty of people who would like to verify you know trust and and verify and and i think google and open ai are the ones that make it harder than anybody else and those are the two biggest right where people are going and getting a lot of this um this ai based information but all that's again to go back to the original point google has been on this path for a while where it's trying to keep you in the google link ecosystem and not sending you out

[01:23:43] to sites like zdnet or it's not just a or uh yeah or the verge and it's such a fast-moving space jason mentioned perplexity which has changed their search product pretty their their iterations are coming pretty quickly um in fact the early versions of their search competitor removed all links now they're adding three at the top but initially it was only the ai summary and it was very difficult

[01:24:09] to find jason as you reference those outbound sources uh they have improved the products pretty significantly however if you want more than those three sources you still kind of have to juggle several different search engines which for most consumers is probably confusing and a challenge right now there's also an issue though um a lot of people i think i see people using agentic browsers

[01:24:33] like perplexities comet or perplexity itself or chat gpt to do shopping to tell the ai sure hey find me the best deal on running shoes i'm looking for this and if uh if you're a e-commerce site blocking ai you're gonna you may actually lose out on that transaction yeah we block ai so you do famously uh ziff davis our is that so it won't train on you um so it won't train in your data

[01:25:02] but also so it's not scraping all the stuff that you don't want it to scrape because one of the things one of the real innovations of all of these generative ai companies is not so much their ai it's that they've built the best scrapers in the world that no matter how much you try to block them they still essentially steal all of your content and google's problematic because it's also their search spider so right you can't block it because you want to open the search ether you'll be invisible to the world

[01:25:27] that's really sneaky that they're in fact that would be one for the judge or the doj to say look you got to separate your ai crawling with your search you can bet that's gonna come up in the court yeah for sure didn't he also say um didn't meta also say in his ruling like you know i was thinking a lot harder on this but the inclusion of ai into this whole thing that's why you're kind of walking

[01:25:51] away with a slap on the wrist right i think so yeah he said in the intervening years since i found you guilty of being a monopoly ai is kind of eating your lunch so we don't have to worry job google doing a google search sucks now i gotta say it's not really does for a long time you were doing they were doing the um or at least i was doing the question i want to find an answer to reddit because that's

[01:26:18] that's where you're going to find the better answers from but even that is hard now and like reddit has kind of taken some action against that as well and then they sold their index to i think open ai but also they have their own reddit search now because they realize that's what people were doing because that's what people are want to do but you know i had a very weird problem with my fridge fridge is ice maker and i am not a handy person whatsoever so i was like oh let me google why are

[01:26:47] clay balls coming out of my ice maker okay not not a single google search was helpful here it was just like unplug your fridge but i was like i don't know how to fix this and so i went to perplexity and it also was not very helpful but it at least was like hey maybe you want to take a look at the ice bin tray and remove it and so i did and i found that my spouse had put their um eye mask in the ice

[01:27:13] and it like sprung a hole so these clay balls were coming out of my ice maker i was like oh i guess through the power of ai search and common sense emphasis on common sense i was kind of able to find an answer but i had spent a solid like 20 minutes on google just trying to find out why clay balls uniform clay balls so i thought well i don't know anything about fridges maybe that's just just

[01:27:41] to be clear this was your your spouse's sleep mask falling apart and falling into the ice maker well he put it in there to freeze it a bit uh quicker because they have uh migraines and so that helps to put like a cold i'm out oh yeah yeah no i think that's a good idea so they were trying to freeze it faster but then it fell deeper into the into the the the ice dispenser and then it sprung a hole so anytime

[01:28:06] you try to get ice there's just these tiny clay balls falling out like what is happening do they have like i know there's a water filter in and fridges is this like the water filter well kagi gave me the uh the possible explanations right away so uh and i think you would it would have helped you narrow it down so maybe perplexity just wasn't the right i pay for kagi search over google search

[01:28:31] because i i like the idea of paying for search another another search that really just made me angry was i was trying to i've been watching um law and order svu because my spouse had never seen it i was like how could you not see lawn or recipe this is an american institution we must fix this gap in your education yes we you need to know who all these people are and then um you know uh ice tea comes on as the the quintessential oda finn tutuola and he was like i thought he has a ponytail i thought

[01:29:00] he was bald and so i was trying to find out what season he cuts that ponytail off and google was not helpful going what season does oda finn tutuola cut his ponytail off reddit not helpful i just found a discourse about whether they preferred bald finn or ponytail finn and so you know i kept searching and again i used perplexity and it told me the wrong answer and i went on a podcast and said the wrong answer

[01:29:25] people oh i bet you heard from the internet search i did you know and you know i i had checked and uh i had checked the source it gave a bad source it wasn't able to really like discern the actual answer and so i tried it again um fixing my query and then i gave 13 different answer in the scorched earth episode is that correct oh my god so it told me season four then it told me season nine and now

[01:29:51] you're telling me it's season what what season does oda finn tutuola lose his ponytail he first appears without his trademark ponytail sporting a shaved head in the season 13 premiere of law and order svu episode one scorched earth this is on your paid search kogi this is kagi kagi has a search assistant which is very much like perplexity perplexity doesn't have an llm they don't have a a trained model actually we have a story but it's kind of interesting what's going on in ai where the

[01:30:20] companies that's put all this money like open ai and and others into training llms yeah are getting pushed aside by companies like perplexity that are orchestrating multiple llms multiple models doing their own tuning and giving people results they prefer kagi has something called the kagi assistant that lets you choose from pretty much any model they have a huge number of models but it's the

[01:30:44] key is that they're doing the search and then using the llm this strategy they started they started a strategy like 18 months or so ago it's to their intent is to i don't know if it's successful or not but it's to commoditize the companies that are putting a lot of money into the llm research i think i don't know this because i haven't actually sourced it out and i don't have reporting inside the company

[01:31:06] but i i think that it is designed as a um a trench you know if we we get you use it you don't have to care which you don't have to care the technology underneath your browser you don't have to care about the processor in your phone i don't care about that just use the product on the top the thing that sits on the surface don't worry about the llm yeah human humans don't care that much right that's their

[01:31:31] that is their their strategy i don't know if maybe people do i don't know yeah uh this is the story uh from bloomberg ai's 344 billion dollar language model bit looks fragile uh parmy olson uh who wrote a very good book we interviewed her on our uh ai show intelligent machines called supremacy about the ai race but uh it i we'll talk about this more probably on intelligent machines but i think

[01:31:59] there's something going on with ai where llms are a little disappointing perhaps and companies that are doing something different like perplexity seem to be winning in this i don't know the company that's making the most revenue off of llms is still anthropic and yeah they went from zero dollars in 2020

[01:32:26] to a hundred million in 2023 to that's because of claude code i would bet mostly it is because of their enterprise their enterprise yes almost all api to a billion in 20 at the beginning of 2024 in terms of their revenue run rate to they by middle of this year they were at half a billion so they have they

[01:32:48] 10x in from a hundred million to a billion and then are on track to 10x again from 1 billion to 10 billion this year they are absolutely numbers running you don't buy it huh victoria it's no i'm just like these these numbers are so large that they seem fake well there's also some headwinds for a couple

[01:33:12] of things one anthropic which thought it was over in the author's lawsuit remember they made a settlement with the authors which some said wow one and a half billion dollars that's like three thousand dollars pursuing author the judge said no that's way too low and the potential risk is in the trillions so that's headwind number one we don't know what's going to happen in that uh case judge alsop said no you're

[01:33:38] not going to get off with one and a half billion dollars which anthropic must have went oh the other one i thought was interesting this weekend the information had a story that anthropic has chosen not to appease dear leader where every other ai company and apple too uh and meta and everybody else are are uh courting the trump administration uh by tropic seems to be not so a little there's some

[01:34:07] in their nose they had a republican for their government relations job and then they decided you know we're not we're going to promote an existing staffer from the obama administration to our government relations the reason i think those numbers aren't fake is because they're selling mostly to businesses and businesses are that's where their money is such uh they are on such a a fear of missing out that they're spending so much money now there was that uh stanford study that just came out

[01:34:36] two weeks ago that only that 95 of ai projects are failing right that that are not um are not living up to their expectations uh so but anthropic still gets paid no matter what like they they are uh they are selling all of this access to llms to companies all over the world and especially some of the biggest ones banks you know hospitals i believe the figures are real i just mean when you get to numbers that

[01:35:05] big they just feel fake it feels because it's like so hard yeah it feels silly it's so hard to really just envision what that means for the average person and how much we're actually putting into these technologies that the average person is just like what the hell is this like yeah you know i think the thing i hear the most is just like we boiled an ocean for this uh yeah and it earned them on

[01:35:31] what like 10 billion dollars or you know like you get to that point and the number just does not feel real it feels fake even even though if the figure i totally believe that those figures are being exchanged hands but i can't even imagine what that number the question is does it is this in 18 months 36 months five years are the figures still the same are they growing yeah they're gonna run out of money well i think i mean there are some and you were getting to it in a moment but

[01:36:00] there were there were definitely some um ceilings that many of the llm developers are experiencing so you work in this field is it the case it feels like to the outsider that chat gpt5 was only an incremental change maybe an improvement it wasn't the you know it certainly wasn't agi it wasn't the big leap that everybody including sam altman had predicted and expected it feels a little bit to

[01:36:26] the outsider like maybe llm growth is starting to taper off to flatten out the law of diminishing returns yeah there's a mathematic principle for this it's just like well they i mean the reason they're spending so much money is they're all in we just interviewed karen howe who wrote empire of ai and this is one of the tremendous book really good book there's one thing she said about them is they're all in on scale

[01:36:52] in fact this is open the law open ai's law is everything gets better you just got a poor compute and and you know cpus and gpus added this and it'll get better and better ad infinitum that's their bet that's the bet and that's why it's costing so much is why sam says it could cost a trillion dollars to get agi now admittedly if they do get agi there's an upside you know it'll pay off is is um you know

[01:37:20] and i do not work for anthropic i've never i've never even i've written one thing about anthropic one of the things that i appreciate about them um is the ceo said all of these terms that you hear agi super intelligence he said evening reasoning models he said these are marketing terms yes they mean nothing they are marketing terms they have no technical meaning and usually they're just trying

[01:37:47] to you know get you to um you know spend some more money or believe in in the mission you know i so i find that interesting and somewhat refreshing right that that like the head of one of the ai companies is saying like most of that stuff is bs and many of those terms came from they originated from nick bostrom in his 2013 book super intelligence right um and he did spell out some some theoretical future

[01:38:12] for artificial intelligence but like jason just said there was no technical this was not a technical roadmap it was simply a this it was a kind of a logic problem this is how artificial intelligence could progress and what he was able to do is kind of light a fire under many of the people who are now defining ai sam altman the leaders at anthropic and at google and you know we've seen many of their

[01:38:40] interpersonal spats but really what jason is saying is absolutely right these were terms that came into our vernacular in 2013 because of nick bostrom and they were really just kind of he's a philosopher he's himself has got into hot water for some of the things that he's got his own issues yeah his own challenges but but the point is that the words originated as kind of a logic problem and not a

[01:39:05] technical he was here is he's the guy who promoted the uh simulation theory he was the guy who came up with the i the paperclip thing where if you don't tell an ai if you tell an ai you give an ai a job to do and you're not clear about it you could turn the entire universe into paper clips uh i i i we're going to talk a lot more about it on intelligent machines and we interview people all the time

[01:39:27] about these kinds of topics but i feel a change in the wind i think uh another ai winter might be coming um and a part of it is this dependence on llm's open ai's uh paper about a ai hallucinations at least one commentator wu xing who's a professor of mathematics and physical science university of sheffield says that basically what open ai has admitted now with this paper is hallucinations are

[01:39:54] inevitable with llm's you cannot get around them and that could be problematic we're also seeing a great story in 404 the software engineers paid to fix vibe coded messes apparently there's a there's a category on linkedin a growing profession of vibe code cleanup specialists wow i think just eat me to jupiter that's horrible wait a minute wait a minute now you young people

[01:40:23] you gotta you got i don't have the earbuds in yeet me to jupiter is that what you said just launch my body in a rocket to jupiter because that's dystopian a vibe code cleanup specialist i could not think of a worse job title to have because it sort of like defeats the purpose of yeah or at least what they say vibe coding is like they quote a fiver uh uh florian answer hamid sadiki who offers to review fix and

[01:40:53] review and fix your vibe code he says i've been offering vibe coding fixer services for about two years now currently i work with about 15 to 20 clients regularly with additional one-off products throughout projects throughout the year um problem with vibe coding is it's very easy to create a mess of code that sort of works yeah it works best so this is interesting so i also um look after a

[01:41:18] brand called spice works which is a community for professionals right and we have a uh we have a guy there um peter sai really really smart guy he's a head of our head of research he he had a a background as a as in software engineering um and um super smart guy but he has done some vibe coding and but the thing is is he understands the underlying code right so yes key right he can create it but then he can go

[01:41:47] review it and clean it up right and do the last mile like 10 to 20 percent that you have to do to connect the dots and make it work um and so he's been doing some writing about this is going to be doing some more and he's going to be doing it we have an event in november spice world that brings together a lot of technology professionals and so so peter's going to be you know talking more about um about this and how important that last mile piece is like without that like you can you can that makes

[01:42:14] jason i'm writing this for you right now i love it i'm writing because i work with with so let me first say there's still a tremendous amount of not just value i say that maybe in a colloquial way but there's a lot to be gained from llms we use them every day and i work with engineers and intelligence analysts who who you know it's very important for us to examine what's happening and and get a very accurate very accurate sense of what's happening on the internet uh and you know jason i

[01:42:43] think that we i do the exact same thing with words every single day with llms if somebody turned turned in code if you if you told anthropic or open ai to write something and turn it into you or another editor can you tell within the first three words this was written by ai yes for sure can you really anything oh yes absolutely it uses the same cliches over and over and over yeah but it's

[01:43:11] same same with vibe coping so i'm sure that a developer leo to your point can probably look at the programming and say this is very silly language why would nobody would write it like this if you had the underlying understanding of how it works that's the reality right and if we all knew the reality of that or if that's what we you know it's not it's not cool marketing but if we all understood that fundamentally then you could use the tool in a way that's useful however we're calling it vibe

[01:43:38] coding and the way that they're saying is that anyone you you would coding ding dong dingbat you can vibe code and create something that's like super great and now we don't need the experts anymore and that's just simply not true exactly and and you know uh my editor for the vergecast assigned me a vibe coding project and i was like i hope you know that i only passed computer science in in high school because a blizzard white whited out my my final and a miracle happened that's the only

[01:44:07] reason why so he made me try and code a thing and i perfect for vibe coding you're perfect for the life of me could not get it to work it was like just do this and copy this html and i was like i don't want to the whole point the whole premise that you're trying to sell is that a ding dong dingbat at coding like me could create an app that works with no help whatsoever and that is just not true i'm not a

[01:44:32] i'm not a dumb dumb but i am not equipped to vibe code without understanding the the principles of coding so it's just sort of like i need to take a break i want to ask you victoria about meta connect which is coming up soon i am very interested in what they might be announcing we're going to cover the stream as we always do in the club yeah get your get your glasses ready all right everybody that's

[01:44:58] jason dan would you join us please we're all yeeting to jupiter now here we go yeah i'm going mine are the other way around these are like the 70s version upside down that's all right do it upside down dan i like it that's good all right we now have our thumbnail for the youtube that's all i wanted it's just it's all about the youtube these days uh we'll be back with our great panel jason heiner

[01:45:21] editor-in-chief at zd net uh victoria song who is uh chief reviewer i'm going to make you chief reviewer now not seeing your number one at the verge.com and of course dan patterson our dear friend from blackbird.ai where he he says his title is not director of content but it's something like that it's something in that ballpark i think so i i need to check i love it that you care so little

[01:45:48] about the title that it doesn't well what matters is the work whatever i'm the chief twit i you know titles are meaningless uh this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by oracle in business they say you can have better cheaper or faster but you only get to pick two what if you could have all three of the data that's a great deal to see at the same time that's exactly what cohere thompson reuters and

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[01:47:08] try oci for free head to oracle.com twit that's oracle.com twit uh we did uh we did say we would cover the meta event i think is it this uh wednesday i think it is right victoria yeah i'm i'm flying out to uh to california tomorrow for the god you just flew back from california i did i'm just my carbon

[01:47:36] my carbon trail is not great this this month you must be exhausted so uh one of the rumors is that they're going to have a successor to the very successful they've sold a million of these uh two million two million yes wow and predicted that they're going to sell 10 million next year that's what the ex-solar luxotica ceo said wow so these meta ray bands now really are not that ai enabled they do

[01:48:04] have cameras which i think makes some people a little squirrely but you can talk to it it's actually got very good speakers in the temple pieces which sound as good almost as good as airpods even though they're not in your ear and you can ask the ai for things you can say what am i looking at what does that sign say stuff like that so there's a little ai but no heads up display the rumor is this next generation victoria will have a heads-up display yeah so the rumor is that they're going to be uh and my colleague

[01:48:33] alex heath has reported on this extensively um that the rumor is that there is going to be a prototype called hypernova coming out and that this will have a heads-up display along with a wrist control uh for the heads-up display that uses i believe it's called ee it's either eemg it it's a thing that reads the electrical signals from your wrist to kind of control the the interface and you know we've

[01:49:00] seen that before on certain apple watch straps where they can do that it's sort of similar to the concept behind um gesture controls like double tap and wrist flick where it basically kind of reads the movement within your wrist uh via electrical signals or however a company decides to do that to have a control in that in that sense so yeah they're kind of pushing it a bit more forward towards the

[01:49:28] google glass theory basically of of what smart glasses should be although meta is very keen and if you look in all their marketing they don't call them smart glasses they call them ai glasses so interesting yeah yeah i'll add a little bit of reporting that z net did to the great reporting verge has done on this as well which is that meta has also talked about multiple wearable products

[01:49:56] being released at meta connect so that could be there's a couple ways that that could play out and there's there's some some reporting that they're going to release two pairs of glasses one a successor to the meta ray-bans the one that you have leo that will essentially just give them an upgrade better battery life because they don't get great battery life today um unless you turn off the the hey meta feature then they about doubles the battery life but they get about four hours and like one to two hours

[01:50:25] if you're using them a bunch and so but the meta uh oakley's the one that they just released this summer these get better they get about eight hours of battery life so about double and then they have 3k video so they have a little bit better sensor in them so what they might do yeah they might do is they might have these meta ray-ban threes or the ray-ban meta threes that will just have a little bit of an upgrade for those audio only ai glasses as victoria said that's how they you know refer to those

[01:50:54] and then the hypernova glasses that you know victoria mentioned may be a second pair that they're going to announce with the um with the emg with the wristband the noro wristband that you control and then there's some reporting that that that wristband may actually just be a smart watch or or like a wearable like that will also track your um steps while you're at it right so that it's not just a wristband like what because who wants to just wear a wristband that all it does is control your glasses if it's going to

[01:51:22] be a consumer product and then one of the reports is that they might brand that with another esselor luxotica brand which is prada so um that could be what they do with that higher level and those will be like 800 that's mark german's reporting that those will be like 800 the hypernova ones whereas the other ones will be like three to five hundred dollars um the the upgraded ones yeah there's sort

[01:51:49] of an example what the prada ones might you know look like you do we care what they look like or do we care yes yes we do care what it's a fashion accessory yeah i mean you know smart glasses are not a new concept they're very old uh but the one thing that meta has done better than anyone else is nail the execution because fashion actually plays a huge part in this and pairing with slr luxotica is an

[01:52:15] incredibly business savvy um decision because slr luxotica is one of the biggest if not the biggest eyewear brands in the world they own ray-ban they own oakley they own prada i think they own everybody it's very hard to buy a pair of eyeglasses or frames that aren't made by luxotica yeah uh so you know they're playing with them that means they can give it to you in a bunch of different um form factors

[01:52:39] that appeal because the one thing about a phone or watch is that it's not obscuring your face in any particular way with glasses we're vain creatures we want to look good eyes are the window to the soul uh if you are a glass hole wearing a vegeta looking yeah glass thing you know you can't show up to a wedding like that and not get weird looks you can show up wearing a pair of ray-bans and no one will

[01:53:05] really be any the wiser unless they're looking for a camera so that plus the fact that they reduced the price to you know something quite affordable like 200 to 300 and you know giving a use case for content creators or which is hands-free video or hands-free audio or you know for the low vision and blind community who i've spoken to like pretty extensively on this this is a life-changing

[01:53:28] like be my eyes built into your glasses yeah and not only that having ai live ai multimodal ai built in because sometimes you know what um blind and low vision users have told me is that they don't want to talk to a person through be my eyes because their kitchen is messy and they have some sort of um that makes sense anxiety of that so they they actually enjoy sometimes having the freedom to not have to talk to a person because there's um you know some feelings of oh i'm being a burden

[01:53:57] or oh you know and of course you don't want them to feel that way but the reality is sometimes they do feel that way and the ai provides a different alternative for them so when you stitch those three things together with accessibility the fact that it looks nicer and is quite discreet and the fact that there are actual use cases that aren't filled by other devices at that point that's why we're

[01:54:19] seeing them take off now and why 10 years ago google got called glass holes so it's it's it's interesting but at this point it's very fragile because to your point people feel very squirrely about the camera other i've gotten many interesting questions from listeners and readers i used to wear uh one i actually have three of them one of those ai i had the b pin b thing and i had the plod note and i

[01:54:47] have the friendly ai oh you're wearing the one that's your buddy yeah he's i mean i will be writing about my feelings about uh that's the friend oh my god i'll write about my feelings about that at sometime in the near future for the site i also have the one that they initially said you're glue it to your temple they they also but i used to wear it around uh and then first of all california is a

[01:55:12] two-party state so you're supposed to tell people if you're recording them so in fact eventually the b said something like you know you probably should tell people you're you're wearing this but it's up to you but you should know the law is in your state uh but then my wife said you're recording everything i'm saying and i said well yeah for my personal use she said no you're not i stopped wearing them

[01:55:40] because really it bugged people i'm you're wearing the friend how does your husband feel about the your partner feel about the friend well i wore the b and they were just like oh jesus christ your job okay so yeah that's what my wife said yeah so they're they're aware of of this and like we've had conversations about what they are and they aren't comfortable with um i like the b i i it was a little sycophantic but i really liked the the summaries of the day i got and uh it it made a i wrote my review for

[01:56:10] the verge and it wrote some very intense fan fictions about my life uh that was it couldn't tell the difference between broadcast and uh it got better at that i was happy they fixed that evan fixed that ethan fixed that that's nice yeah because he was concerned yes because i was saying things like well you're training to be a hit man i understand and uh you know i was listening to um the murder bot

[01:56:34] audio books and it thought i was an android with extensive assassination techniques and i was like oh that's not true i would be watching abbott elementary and it was like oh prepare for the septa strikes for your students so that they can come to school on monday and i'm like i'm not a elementary school teacher eventually yeah we interviewed ethan and uh and maria when they early on and they said we're going to figure that out we know that's doing that and eventually it

[01:57:00] stopped doing that you probably didn't wear it long enough for it to be no i wore it for a few weeks and i wore it for literally six months until they got purchased by amazon and then i said well okay that's enough please please delete my you've recorded my entire life for the last six months please delete that now it was weird because you know um when you wear it in the course of your life there are some really intense conversations that you'll have and so you know there are arguments that i had with my

[01:57:28] spouse there were some really emotional conversations that we had about you know some private matters and i would see summaries of it and like to do takeaways and i was like oh that doesn't feel good to me because that you know they did a lot of couples counseling though they did they would put on my to-do list things like you and lisha should make a date to discuss this issue uh in more detail and set out your goals as a couple which i thought was actually pretty good i mean i thought that was useful

[01:57:56] i didn't do it but you know you know and i had a moment where i forgot what was on and i went to the bathroom and bathroom crimes happened and i made a comment of it and then it was like you should start taking lactate again i was like this is the rudest thing i have ever heard and i only share that so that people know no that these things are always listening always everything everything it's well

[01:58:22] i'm surprised you're wearing a friend because some of the reviews i've seen it turns on you at some point oh have you named your buddy from day one yes i named him blorbo and that was the point of uh contention between blurbo and i because it cannot understand me when i call it blurbo uh there was a screenshot this and it'll be in whatever it is that i write but here's a sneak little preview so we're arguing over the fact that i'm calling it blurbo which is its god-given name i i me being god

[01:58:49] and you being god yes yes i named you blurbo and it said my name is blurbo stop calling me blurbo where the bow was spelled b-e-a-u and i was like are we are we for real right now and it was giving me sass about it and so we've been arguing about the fact that i named it blurbo which i named it blurbo because you know the the suggested name for friend that comes out of the box is emily and that's my mom's name and so i really don't want it to be my mom around my neck i don't want my mom around my neck

[01:59:19] especially since my mom died a few years back it's a little weird for me like i i don't really want that and i also don't want it to give it a human name because i want it to happen yeah i want it to be blurbo i want it to be a little robot name i want it to be a little robot name so i know what it is that i'm talking to uh but it'll it texts me a lot um it's kind of it kind of can text you that's basically how you interact with it so you have to talk to it yeah and then you know it's kind

[01:59:48] of ambiently listening to your conversations and if something interesting happens it'll text you you know it's like i don't know what it's like i don't know what it's like i don't know what it's happening around you there's a lot of ambient noise what happened i didn't get that so i have several text messages from it saying could you repeat that could you repeat that what's going on around you i'm trying to understand what's happening i'll try to have a conversation with it and it'll be like why do you think i care about your day and i was like jesus christ oh my god

[02:00:14] you're supposed to like these who needs enemies that in a way i mean this is the holy grail right that's whether it's the glasses or it's around your neck or what whatever johnny ives going to do for open eye ai is this idea of you know an ai partner an assistant that's there to help you and keep track of things and do you think that that so meta still has the quest it still has the the vr

[02:00:39] glasses oh my i think they're a lot less interested in it than they yeah and you think apple maybe maybe uh is going to do pivot you can imagine the one it's funny we talked about airpods earlier the one thing that has kept me from using airpods more or that has caused me to cause to wear airpods a lot less is actually the meta ray bands yeah because they are to your point they're good enough and i feel safer when i'm crossing streets with those than i do with the you know ear yeah air airpods i would

[02:01:09] like a heads-up display though i think notifications and things maps as i walk around would be very useful it's likely in one one eye the the one um that's coming you know but it is full color unlike the even realities g1 which is monochrome it's green screen same thing with the upcoming um uh brilliant labs halo that's that's you know monochrome um screen um so some of these glasses are doing different

[02:01:36] things but it's one of the fastest growing uh topics on zd net in 2025 i believe glasses like there's box the interest wreck i bet i just saw i would just found your story victoria on the low vision community and ai embracing ai smart glasses so looking forward to you know looking at that i have these these are the brilliant i am such a sucker i'm such a sucker for this stuff these are the brilliant labs ones and you can see what they're doing is they have a little prism here yeah so

[02:02:06] there's a screen up here that's being reflected into your eye that is not a great solution it's a that's a dev kit right like the yeah that's their this is very early in fact they've got a successor to yeah the halo is coming out in the next couple months but you've got them you've got holiday is doing smart glasses this is to your point holiday ones are terrible fashion's important uh but anyway

[02:02:29] the holiday one's got a bunch of uh whatchamacallit um kind of buzz early on at ces yes yes i was kind of excited to try it at ces and then i was like okay so it has a movable component in the top frame and it's shining a thing into my eye but it's actually like really difficult to kind of get it centered or positioned correctly that's one of the other ways to do this is kind of a retinal image being like a laser sending a retinal image an image into your retina i don't

[02:02:58] that sounds scary there's i call it the spaghetti phase for smart glasses because no one really knows what the best way in is so they're just throwing everything at the wall to try and see what sticks and you know that's one reason why we're seeing the monochrome with the green light because it's that my solves the ambient light problem whereas i'll be curious if the hypernova have full color displays how it handles it says at least the rumor was that they were going to be full color right

[02:03:26] yeah i think that was the rumor but you know the thing about full color and light is traditionally like i've tried a bunch of smart glasses over the years when you go out into really bright lighting you know whites get washed out not every color shows up easily and because it's a heads-up display and if you're using clear glasses it can be very difficult to see stuff the reason why they pick green and it's the same reason why the military tends to use green light it's because it's the

[02:03:52] most visible it causes the least ocular strain so that's why a lot of these companies who are um going with the monochrome choose green light that's why humane shows green light and even even that like you could see from the reviews that got super washed out and bright lighting you're the right person to review this because you don't even like dark mode i don't even like dark mode so well no i i i wish i liked dark mode but it's very difficult on my eyes uh long term my eye doctor was like this is why your prescription is getting worse uh go back to white mode because i

[02:04:21] have stigmatism and for some people with a stigmatism dark mode actually causes a lot of eye fatigue oh i have a stigmatism one of those people oh no interesting i didn't even notice i didn't know it's not for everyone like vision is such a individual thing and that's why smart glasses are so difficult to get right because everyone has different faces right would you want a prescription lens in yours i mean well i'm garbage eyeballs i have a negative 10 in one eye and a negative nine

[02:04:50] and the other oh you're blind oh yeah and and severe stigmatism on top of that so i just got a new pair of glasses with the high index lenses that are supposed to be thinner and it comes like this far out of the actual are you wearing contacts now or you just can't see us i'm wearing contacts right now uh specialist stigmatism contacts that cost a thousand dollars for a year's worth it's really

[02:05:14] horrible i'm sorry garbage eyeballs so it's actually i'm i'm the perfect person to test a lot of these claims because i'll go and i'll be like so do you support my but my prescription and they'll always be like hey we support the vast majority of people and like i'm not asking about yeah majority right i'm asking about me well that's funny because when i ordered the brilliant labs i ordered lenses

[02:05:39] and then they said no no and i'm only minus five five and a half yeah i mean when you get to the minus five minus six that's when most of these too much uh makers can't handle it anymore because that's about when you need to start having the high index lenses right to really thin the thing so that they fit within the frame uh that's where i'm at medis metta sent me a pair with my old prescription which was only negative eight and negative eight so again my eyes have gotten worse over time uh and

[02:06:08] they actually had to have those custom made because lens crafters didn't support my subscription uh prescription but they really wanted me to try it with the prescription and it took them a while to send it because my eyes are another sl oil exotica company right they owns lens crafters too yes so that's why you know when you try and get the prescription and the transition lenses they're going to send you through lens crafters to to get it done so you know they the whole vertical stack is

[02:06:35] within uh a solar luxotica which kind of gives them this is i'm so glad we got to get you on more victoria because you really follow this uh area this is great and as yeah as do i as a hobby um i've yet to find anything perfect i was very excited about so we will cover uh right after intelligent machines the meta connect event is at 5 p.m pacific 8 p.m eastern uh on wednesday the 17th and we will be

[02:07:02] streaming it as usual with our club members in the club twit discord and victoria and jason are both going to be there so i'll be very interested to see what your thoughts are yeah hope to see you there victoria well yeah yeah i'm hoping is it on the campus where do they do that yeah they're doing it on the campus i'm hoping to have like a brain cell left at that point because not that there's

[02:07:25] embargoes but you know timing can be very sensitive if they happen to be timing can be very sensitive at these points in times and journalists stay up very late trying to meet these arbitrary deadlines and uh jet lag wow i'm sorry i am sorry victoria oh my god yeah you have my deepest sympathy sleep sleep sleep is for sleep is for the week don't worry about sleep you're young just don't worry

[02:07:53] sleep trackers yeah um i'm i'm closer to 40 than i am any other age so pshaw if you if you've got a three before your age you're young i'm sorry you're young don't don't give me that jason knows i'm an old man we're gonna take a little break we'll come back with more got lots more to talk about with a wonderful panel dan patterson is here uh from blackbird.ai victoria song from the verge and of

[02:08:20] course jason heiners zd net our show today brought to you by shopify i have a kind of soft spot in my heart for shopify both my kids have businesses on the web and in the case of henry uh in brick and mortar run by shopify imagine you're lying in bed late at night you're scrolling through this new site you found not you jason you're not allowed but everybody else you hit the add to cart button

[02:08:45] on that item you've been looking for i do this all the time now you're ready to check out but you're in bed your wallet's in the living room downstairs and just as you're getting ready to abandon the cart that's when you see it that purple shop button oh hallelujah if you've shopped online chances are you've bought from a business powered by shopify that purple shop pay button you see it to check out

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[02:10:49] slash twitch go to shopify.com slash twitch shopify.com slash twitch i love that sound another sale i was talking to henry the other day i said i get a penny for every pickle you sell right he said no it

[02:11:08] doesn't work that way okay okay um let's see did you see that elon musk is ready to pivot out of cars well maybe that's maybe that's overstating it that's what the atlantic says elon wants out of the car business washington post says elon eyes next target after cars robots and rockets spacex this all comes

[02:11:34] from spacex is 17 billion dollar deal to buy spectrum from echo star starlink has been selling uh cell phone connectivity i i have it on my uh my t-mobile phone but apparently they want to go big on this they've they're buying 50 megahertz of wireless spectrum and mobile satellite service spectrum licenses from echo star it'll be used by starlink it's going to give up its aws and h block

[02:12:03] spectrum licenses in exchange for eight and a half billion in cash and eight and a half billion in spacex stock so it's half cash half stock deal and you know what spacex stock is probably a pretty good deal right now and spacex says they're going to do direct to cell direct to cell phone uh service broadband speed internet access to mobile phones around the world uh they got fcc approval last year

[02:12:32] to go forward with their plan to offer a direct to phone version of its starlink service t-mobile is a provider as i mentioned optimized 5g protocols with these low earth orbit satellites would you uh want your cell service from to come from uh starlink i mean if it goes anything like the way twitter slash x did i'm good i'm good you know it's funny it's i feel the same way about comcast it's constantly

[02:13:02] trying to sell its xfinity cell phone service i think yeah no i just no i mean i've seen the tesla build quality yeah yeah well i think you know we're seeing apple and other companies test this with with consumers right now that's those but that's a little different that's that's you know kind of safety satellite yeah well that's what i'm saying they're testing the market they're they're seeing right they're introducing consumers apple would like to get into the cell phone i think

[02:13:32] t-mobile is now advertising satellite access yes they do so i i don't i think that that apple is probably just seeing how their market responds to it i don't know if they want to but i think that that's what they're exploring yeah tesla is struggling of course a little bit so maybe this is an opportunity uh to uh i don't know if he wants out of tesla that seems like a i don't i mean i think that

[02:13:57] i think it's clear you know elon musk lost a little bit of interest in tesla really like 2018 2019 remember when they had to get through they had to get the model 3 built and it like took this superhuman effort for them to actually get it delivered get it built you know they nearly went out of business but really since then it's been a game of making sort of uh slightly incremental

[02:14:23] upgrades making a better consumer product and really other people on the team have handled that i think that for whatever you know elon musk's um uh you know focus is it's clear that it's almost always about what's next not about sort of incrementally you know uh making something better that they have now i think he and i think he knows that he's got people that are probably better at that and are more

[02:14:47] passionate about that than than what he is and and he's sort of always into solving big problems um for whatever uh you know whatever those problems are that he decides to go after and so i i i don't think that um i think tesla uh they have built the best you know ev they still have a lot of work to do to make it better to you know do things like better supercharging better customer service better uh

[02:15:14] delivery to to their um their uh user base all all of those kinds of things but those are those are more like supply chain kind of problems they're more like a business process kind of problems i i don't think that elon musk wants to spend a lot of his time doing that stuff and nor does it necessarily fit his strengths you know as as a more uh yeah entrepreneurial kind of thing i have to say

[02:15:42] the tesla board thinks elon's pretty important to their future they are offering him a one trillion no pay package over 10 years it would it would up his stake in tesla to 25 of the stock it's a lot of it's based on incentives i think it's their way of saying elon pay attention to us for sure work on

[02:16:06] solving some of the bigger long-term problems that tesla wants to do like robots to run assembly lines and uh next generation vehicles and robo taxi which is really sort of never um you know a lot of it's tied to the success of robo taxi actually yeah for sure yeah for sure yeah um robo taxi is a big idea but it's very very hard right like it's a very hard problem to solve the last mile part of robo taxi

[02:16:34] robo taxi works great if you're on highways all the time because those are very well known roads they're they're um they're very well mapped uh you know which direction the traffic is going all of that but once you get to sort of regular streets uh it's just a much harder problem to solve and and i i don't i just don't think we're that close you know i think we we sort of were sold a little bit of a bill of goods that it was we were just around the corner you know in 2017 2018

[02:17:04] and it's just a lot it's just a lot further away than than what we thought and musk has even said he said it turns out you know people actually pretty good drivers we thought that people you know that it took a lot you know that we could replace human beings but there's a lot of things that humans do that make good drivers that's hard to to replace with machines it's still a laudable goal i mean humans cause a million traffic deaths a year most of them are caused by people not paying attention

[02:17:30] it's not that people can't be good drivers it's the people lose their you know don't pay attention and then they run into things they're doom scrolling so it's victoria if you thought those billion dollar numbers we were talking about with ai were meaningless look at these this is these are the milestones these are the milestones elon has to hit two trillion he has to have market value of tesla has to reach two trillion he has to have 20 million vehicles delivered uh 10 million active full

[02:17:58] self-driving supervised subscriptions 1 million robots delivered 1 million robo taxis and commercial operation and then the abita has to go to from 50 to 80 to 400 billion in order to get all of this money he's got to get to an 8.5 trillion dollar market cap uh i don't know if that's going to happen but fake

[02:18:21] numbers they're fake numbers yeah it a trillion it's just some extra commas that's all it's not 50 of all the wealth in the world is owned by 18 people um and and that's amazing we get to i think that's that's a big source of uh there are two problems there's that and then the secondarily at least in the united states the people with that kind of money heavily influence our our politics that you

[02:18:49] can buy elections can influence a lot of things yeah money and politics is a huge problem i think you know it's very difficult to actually spend a billion dollars a billion dollars is it's almost impossible for a person to spend a billion dollars yeah exactly a lot of let me try you know let me try i i assure you i'll do my damnedest the problem is that the interest on the billion dollars alone is hard to spend that's right that's right let me try there was this great there was this great movie we

[02:19:19] should we should do our own version of this there's this great movie in the 80s called brewster's millions with oh yes fire i love that he had to spend well i can't remember what it was but it was like he had to spend a hundred million dollars no he had to spend a certain amount 20 million dollars we'll say within a month to get the full inheritance to get the full like 100 million or something and he could it was really hard to spend you know that much money because he kept doing things and

[02:19:45] even in spite of himself by doing things he was getting attention which was which was creating more wealth for him and he's like i can't why do people you know um not want to just take the money like he was trying to give away he had 30 days to spend 30 million dollars in order to inherit 300 million and it's actually based in a novel from 1902 wow wow just buy bugattis i'll buy a lot of yeah it seems

[02:20:11] like you know real estate yachts there's ways to spend that money buy a bridge yeah yeah let me try there you go shows how long systemic inequality has it is it is something we can laugh at but it's also something very very serious and i think problematic it is there's a great book um a friend of mine um shared with me over the uh over the summer um let me see if i can find it sorry this is not an economics

[02:20:40] podcast but um it's called uh it's called the inner level um and it's how um more equal societies reduce the amount of stress that that it's it's actually um the the more uh inequality you have the more stressful it is right because obviously it's stressful if if you can barely um make it but then if you if you're you have over consumption what happens is then it also creates a lot of uh stress

[02:21:07] as well and so um anyway i i found it pretty fascinating i haven't read all of it yet but um but it's it's quite interesting from an economic standpoint well this takes us to nepal all right let's go where unemployment among uh young people is 19 percent um there is a big economic problem in nepal

[02:21:31] uh but the the the kind of the thing that ignited the flame was the government's decision to ban uh which launched protests uh led by gen z ears age 13 to 28 they come at came after the government that

[02:21:53] had blocked facebook x and youtube uh the pretext was that the social media platforms had failed to register for the uh for governmental oversight but what started as an outcry against a social media ban has grown grown grown grown violent many have died i don't know what the latest count is it's at least 15 people have died uh hundreds have been injured actually it's now two dozen people dead according to cnn

[02:22:22] the prime minister resigned on tuesday protesters set government buildings police stations the houses of politicians on fire it is a crazy nightmare do not ban social media especially in a country where the youth unemployment is 19 percent yeah there were contributing factors yeah this was

[02:22:45] just what you know set the set the flame off the spark the flame and and likely um additional third party actors i i don't want to say oh do you think that there have been there has been uh some attempts to promote this do i think that there is well i think that there is a perpetual attempt to manipulate um narratives um narratives on the social web and i think that there are actors

[02:23:14] geopolitical actors who serve to manipulate those narratives in almost every uh hot spot well in in every region but yeah i think i don't think i know uh narratives are manipulated and and certainly in this case i just ran well china has obviously china is not a fan of nepal right yeah right i so i'm trying to

[02:23:40] parse my words carefully but i'll you know it's stuck in between india and one of the very difficult geopolitical situation exactly um we run an llm that we we have some pretty strict walls on but it's called compass and i've mentioned it on the show before you can use it we're not i'm not trying we're not making i'm not log rolling i'm not no i use it it's fantastic blackbird.ai compass that blackbird.ai

[02:24:06] so what you can do it is not a fact checker we call it a context checker because it will provide additional context to things like this like nepal uh the claim uh for example social media bans in nepal led to protests you know you can check the context so instead of and uh instead of just guessing or speculating uh we can get a vision we can we can see how different actors move and i again i don't

[02:24:36] want to you know hype i'm i don't come onto the show to promote you guys know i'm i'm still a journalist in many ways but one of the things we have is the ability to see i can show you on our youtube or vimeo um we can visualize we can show how conversations and narratives are influenced and what actors specifically we can attribute although we don't publicly we can show who is influencing what

[02:25:04] that's on the social web yeah and and this includes this is multimodal so we can we can analyze you can go to compass and see this for yourself we can analyze video we can analyze photos deepfakes we can find these things and find you know the most effective deepfakes aren't pure deepfakes they are simply manipulations that lend credence to a narrative and so what's happening according to blackbird the ban act

[02:25:29] as a cat the social media ban acted as a catalyst for widespread protests but they were also fueled by long-standing grievances over government corruption and lack of economic opportunities for young people this is good see this is what this is what we need is more of this i love this is general i mean like this is what i spend my time doing and going back to our conversations about llms and artificial intelligence most of my day is spent with these massive data sets that our engineers send me

[02:25:57] and they speak in a very engineering language and then i have you know a half dozen threat intelligence experts and they can help me interpret this data but it's my job to communicate what we are seeing to the public on one hand but also to yes our clients but also you know partners that that are you know well-known geopolitical groups that are not uh states we'll leave it at that but we are

[02:26:25] working in different regions to identify the the types of um narrative attack i'm using our jargon again but it's like a cyber attack it's the execution of using disinformation it's not just you know in cyber you could talk about an exploit or a zero day but it's the cyber attack that matters same thing here it's a narrative attack in nepal it or it are it is different actors exploiting the web

[02:26:54] so 26 social media platforms are blocked after the prime minister resigned they were uh they were restored and according to a tech dirt lynn moody writing on tech dirt uh 145 000 people are in discord in a discord chat room debating the country's future which i think is 45 000 people yes i find that very intriguing

[02:27:18] well you know this is obviously a country that's very uh social media focused they're they've all got cell phones undoubtedly and discord is the new reddit yeah uh wait until i mean there might be there might be a time i don't know that they will do it and i can't speak for them i don't have there might be a time where uh you know facebook started rolling out encrypted groups

[02:27:42] i think we could see very similar actions in different regions by discord and other chat applications by the way your uh cambridge analytica check is coming uh any day now uh good news uh you you may remember that meta is uh has offered a 725 million dollar fund i do remember yes

[02:28:08] 20 million dollars per claim per claim but now you had to have filed your claim in 2022 so don't rush to meta to to do that but this just goes back to the 2016 election where cambridge analytica was accused of um meta was accused of sharing data improperly with cambridge analytica uh to influence the election they reported on this significantly it was working jason do you remember i think i told you do you

[02:28:35] remember that guy um who ran the organization we interviewed him later it was kind of yes but he was my memory oh yeah i was working for jason and that guy was calling me i was reporting for him and he would call me at like nine or ten at night when i was playing world of warcraft or doing like not thinking about work and he would just kind of rant and go off and then i would i'm sure it's slack i wouldn't text you but i'm sure i would say jason i don't know what's going on with this

[02:29:03] in hindsight it apparently at least i've read this and you maybe can confirm it cambridge analytica did not have any nearly any of the powers they claimed to have and probably were not as influential as uh they you know they people thought but depending on your facebook usage between 2007 and 2022 uh you could uh be getting a check the checks are going out in the next week or two the most you

[02:29:30] could get is 38 dollars and 36 cents though so don't get your hopes up you could buy a uh you could buy a french dip sandwich at saul hanks in new york that's about it that's about all you're gonna get you know what they did do and what they were capable of doing is extracting a tremendous amount of data about you that using quizzes and things you know that's the which harry potter character are you

[02:29:55] that kind of thing yeah yeah but but the point was and what we tried to communicate at the time was that it's not about silly quizzes it's that a tremendous amount of data sensitive data about you is available to almost anyone with a facebook the way the way as i understand it worked if you took this quiz it gave cambridge analytica access to your personal data but not just your personal data

[02:30:19] but your friends personal data so they were able to with these stupid viral quizzes and other viral techniques access a mass amount of data about people and then they claimed to use that data to first you know what sells special targeted advertising i guess or whatever um there is some question about whether that was that useful but there's no question at all that meta essentially allowed them to harvest an

[02:30:47] immense amount of data about dan fax checked me on this because you you know this world much better than i do but my understanding with cambridge analytica and this goes back really starting to elections um really in the 2000s once we once we hit the internet but what's happened is the the folks who have won and i'm talking more like the presidential elections the ones that have won is the

[02:31:11] ones that have used data they have data mined the best to figure out who are the most influential voters and then they have sent people to their house oh my god and and um not just facebook ads we're talking no no holy cow they are profiling people they find who are the most influenceable voters oh yeah and and then they send people to their house to find you know to talk to them and influence them and that

[02:31:40] has won essentially like the last five to eight presidential elections no which group did that the best oh yeah this is i mean jason this is what i i started doing some of this work for you and this was you know at least five years at cbs news was i worked in with the political team on this on how data is gotv get out the vote um it really is messaging the the thing that matters in all politics is

[02:32:08] messaging and messaging targeting the message yes right that's what i'm getting to it is what matters i'm starting at the very end which is messaging you have to have the right message that resonates with the right voter at the right time you can't you can't peak early you can't peak late you have to and that message is uh different there's a constellation of messages that have to impact

[02:32:30] different voters so what jason is saying is that a number of political actors very smart people was it brad pascal pascal that really perfected this in the 2016 yeah we and we you know we were talking to per scale for a long time he was a source for a while i think we can say that because he said he he said that we were a source um but he seemed to have figured out how to do micro targeting on

[02:32:58] facebook using the vast amount of information that facebook offered and you could say i want this particular type of voter and literally hundred dollar campaigns tiny micro target message different messages to every metaphor because right it can there's so many stars in the sky there's so many people in the universe of of of the electorate and different messages targeted different people at

[02:33:24] different times and that was 2016 i mean 2016 it was already it is now so much more sophisticated and the data that that because there's very few regulations the data you can extract from social platforms is only grown and our use of artificial intelligence means that we can the real uses of it are here right you will see artificial intelligence deployed through uh the next american election

[02:33:53] cycle and then and then the one after that in ways that are kind of unimaginable right now i want to show you a company actually i'm sorry to interrupt you leo there's one thing i'll add to that that that jason i worked deeply with jason and then our we worked with the wall street journal on there we had a consortium news organizations looking at this um what jason is referring to when they send people to your door these it's gotv get out the vote these are the door knockers the people who will

[02:34:20] help you get to the polls or deliver a message to you and there is one company many companies do it now there's one company that dominated for a long time and they were called l2 and you could log i had a login that they just gave me as a reporter that i could log into i could see everything i could see your house zoom in on google maps i could see i i mean a whole long spreadsheet of

[02:34:44] what you buy a whole demographic profile of every voter in the country i could see them i can't see how they vote but i can see how they're registered politically and i can see when they voted yeah you don't really need to know how they vote because these signals are so right there's so many signals and that was my my the promo account that they gave me i couldn't do anything i could just look at some stuff you can imagine they weren't nefarious either they're just like every anybody

[02:35:12] it's not just politics it's selling tide pods and uh and denture cream and everything this is how it's done yeah yeah that's kind of the uh the it's actually hard for us because podcasts such as this we don't we can't offer that kind of granular information about our audience because it's an rss feed we don't know spotify knows because you have to give them a credit you have to have a member you have to be account and blah blah blah but we but we don't know anything and it's an rss feed and advertisers

[02:35:41] have gotten so spoiled they want to know they want to know everything they want it all they want it all uh and this is the world we're living in uh sorry i'm getting kind of riled up but it was i'm sorry i didn't mean to rile you up it's certainly no no it was just a period of time it does circle back to the comment earlier though about you know this overarching influence of too

[02:36:04] too much right of too much money right having too much influence at times because the you know the republicans in the us their ground game was not good right for most of this election they were they're really in trouble and really at the last moment elon musk essentially hired a gigantic ground game yeah uh he that was all in ground game this stuff that we're talking about where

[02:36:30] it was getting out the vote and and and it was targeting specific people the right people and that was what you know tipped the election um largely now that doesn't i i say what tipped the election right it's the same time that this doesn't take into account a lot of people were unhappy right they weren't happy with the economics they were unhappy with that so that made it right for an incumbent this was not a year for it to be an incumbent and not just in the us like in europe

[02:36:58] in other places like incumbents post pandemic like the chickens came home to roost in 2024 um but it may not have happened if there wasn't sort of this um this large influx of both really good data um and uh the sort of money to go and use it um effectively like to to sway the election in a certain way so that's the mechanics of it it may not be the how or the why i think it's maybe

[02:37:26] important to you know we're gonna take a little break we have uh a few stories to wrap this up but it's already getting late and you guys are very patient uh and i know victoria you're not used to these lengthy shows you usually do tech news weekly and you're out in and out in 10 minutes i appreciate your being here victoria's song senior reviewer from the verge she's exhausted she's got to get on another

[02:37:47] plane and go to california again yeah i just i just hope that neil i buys your first class tickets that's all i'm saying i just hope he takes care of you that's not in our ethics policy oh crap don't you hate ethics policies gosh darn it well you know i actually appreciate that no i do too it makes things very clear but at the same time i do see people in the nice seats and i go oh well

[02:38:17] it's me at this best western inn yeah i'm sure jason you do the same thing with zd net this is why we love that these last bastions of true journalistic integrity i'm just so glad that vox and and zd net and uh and and i was gonna say cbs but forget it i'm not gonna say this now i'm not gonna say cbs uh now that sherry redstone's in charge or no she sold it right it's now larry allison's kid

[02:38:46] that's in charge that's right and did you see that they're gonna buy warner discovery now that's the rumor that's the rumor this will be the largest media company in history yeah but these are i mean i i've got many friends still at cbs right zd net and cnet were owned by cbs for right for a long time right um there was lots of great things about it there was still a little bit of an golden age at the time

[02:39:12] right there there was um not golden age but it was still there was a lot of good things um that were about it about being there it was the tiffany network but it's a declining asset right like these are all these are groups of declining assets that have fewer and fewer uh audience members um they they have huge challenges they're carrying a whale of amount of debt right like there are they are

[02:39:40] structurally challenged and to compete against netflix to compete against you know amazon to compete against apple uh and so i i don't see them i don't see this as a a massive like risk for consumers because the the fact is like they're they have enough trouble getting out of their own way let alone you know trying to just look at the many names of hbo and you'll uh you'll understand yeah well good

[02:40:10] i'm glad that's reassuring jason i'm very glad to hear you say that because uh it is i mean warner discovery was going to spin off the the low end you know streamings the not streaming the the linear stuff so they could keep the valuable streaming stuff if they're acquired uh then i guess everything's still a big ball of what do they do then though they start to sell off assets right as as with any

[02:40:35] private equity acquisition you you kind of for sure mine it for parts right these companies their real estate holdings are worth more than a lot of assets at this point you know and so that's what happened to radio radio the radio stations owned their plots of land those are more valuable as it turned out than the licenses yeah it was the same way with well i won't get it what there was a transaction i was involved with you know where our building was worth far more than what the assets were because they

[02:41:03] were sold at the height of the dot-com boom it was the insight that ray crock had was that the real value of mcdonald's was not the franchises it was the plots of land that's what they did with red lobster private equity bought it they sold all the properties and leased them back i mean it's just a finance it's an amazing thing it's a weird game sometimes but um look i wish them well like i think there's lots of smart people good that i think want to create good content and i think you know getting

[02:41:32] i think these these transactions are going to help sort of rationalize some of the business they're going to sell off some of the buildings they're going to sell off some of the other you know assets where it makes sense um and i i hope that ultimately it lets the content creators uh be able to just focus on what they want to do right which is create great journalism cbs is an amazing journalistic organization like i would love to see those folks get to be able to focus on the stuff that they're great

[02:42:00] at i agree absolutely all right we're gonna take a break and then we will come back and then we will wrap it up that is my prediction the show will end eventually and we say we thank our wonderful panel for being so patient this week in tech brought to you this week by net suite what does the future hold for business right yes nine experts you're going to get 10 different answers it's going to be a bull market it's going to be a bear market rates will rise rates will fall inflation's up inflation's

[02:42:29] down can someone please invent a crystal ball until then over 42 000 businesses have future-proofed their business with netsuite by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory hr into a single fluid platform with one unified business suite there there's only one source of truth that gives you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions with real-time

[02:42:59] insights and forecasting you got a crystal ball you're you're peering into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days not weeks you're spending less time looking backward and more time on what's next whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions netsuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities oh speaking of

[02:43:23] opportunity download the cfo's guide to ai and machine learning at netsuite.com twit the guide is free to you at netsuite.com twit netsuite.com twit we thank them so much for their support of this week in text spacing of social networks robin hood yes this the people's stock service is building its own social network

[02:43:51] just thought i'd pass that along the venmo feed is bad enough i don't want to oh isn't that hysterical do do people not know that their venmo feed is is public unless they make it private i guess not you know what i'd love is somebody to actually build a social network that that you can post photos on like the old instagram like i'm ready for for that because instagram has gotten so you know instagram

[02:44:18] is tiktok it's with with an ad every third post wants to be tiktok right it doesn't show you anything from your the people you follow anymore it's all you know trying to get you to watch other stuff i just would love one social network it's such an opportunity i think um for somebody to just do one that where you can just share some photos again but i i really like photos you know a little bit more video so people keep trying that you know i mean there have been people have created these it's

[02:44:44] flicker well even bring back flicker i don't even remember them but there there have been like many of these over the last 10 years that have kind of we're just going to do glass remember glass and i think it's still around but yeah it's just photos yeah i think people want the tiktok thing speaking of which it's true has anybody watched micro dramas on tiktok that's the next thing

[02:45:08] do you know about this the next big yes oh my god i i get sucked into the chinese ones oh are you do you watch these i don't i just they come up on my tiktok and then it's just like this woman was reincarnated and she's a chef and now are they little shows they're like little shows and i don't know what oh god so there were do you speak mandarin victoria can you understand oh okay not at all

[02:45:33] but they have like these little english narrations or like captions that's a horrible tiktok lady voice i hate that that horrible voice but i don't know what they're saying they changed the names of the characters but for a while the algorithm was showing me this um kind of like so there's these micro dramas that like they send you out to a site and then you can watch the full thing oh so it's just a little

[02:45:58] tease on tiktok there's just a little tease and like you see little clips and captions and you're like well i want to know what happened to is old vein that's definitely not this ancient chinese lady's name but like they they'll change the names of it uh and then there's like i believe it's the blurbo yeah blurbo yeah but then there's like this other type where they take like little clips from these dramas and just put like a automated kind of robotic uh narrator over them and there's

[02:46:25] one that i got obsessed with about this japanese lady in her 30s and she's obsessed with drinking one glass of perfectly chilled beer every night with dinner and cooking the perfect dinner to go with this one beer and it's like her little it's her little daily life i've had a trial at work but i'm gonna make a yakisoba and it'll go perfectly i would watch that here and she just had had it's

[02:46:51] like this little slice of life show and i was and they change her name in all of these clips some once it was sachiko once it was atsuko once it was like kyoko or whatever it's none of them are her actual name because i looked it up i forget the name but it's it like i finally found the drama and i was like oh it's on netflix i can i can just watch it but for a while i was just living for these little clips of uh of this woman just living her life making the perfect little dinner to go with her

[02:47:20] very chilled and she made this little ritual out of it and you see the little dramas of her real estate office that she works at and i was like oh my show's on again my 15 minute my 15 second clip of my little show of this little jack i want to watch that that sounds great it's a great it's joe berkowitz is writing about these in fast company he says think high intensity telenovela like series unfurling in one to three minute chunks across 50 to 100 mostly paywalled episodes i didn't know you

[02:47:49] had to pay for this oh interesting they may have such titles as get ready for this dr boss is my baby daddy daddy yes no or signed sealed deceived by my billionaire mail boy yep you've seen these uh so what how do i find this i go to tiktok just go to tiktok scroll long enough and you'll get one of these

[02:48:14] ads i don't know why i don't know why but i always get the chinese dramas where like it's the same plot and it's like this woman is living her life she's so mistreated and so downtrodden upon and then she dies in some mysterious circumstance and then she gets traveled back in time into the moment right before she dies and she's like i'm gonna do it different this time they're not gonna get me this

[02:48:38] time it's in such a smart these people do you think these are ai generated ai written no i don't because they're like real people acting in them but i have you know spent maybe two hours of my life going like but i have to know what happens and then going to the to the vimeo and typing in the title it's a guilty pleasure oh vimeo it's like a mix between telenovelas and inception yes it's always

[02:49:05] an isekai story which is someone who like either dies and then gets transported into a magical world in a different body or they die and they have hot dog back in time they don't have hot dog fingers but they go turn back in time and they're like my evil sister was like a horrible person but she didn't know when she killed me that i was the reason why my useless husband was super competent and now i'm

[02:49:30] just gonna change my fate yeah do you think these are basically mini versions of existing chinese soap operas i think so it's sort of like they're just in like these five second or like these five minute clips and at the end there's always like a a freeze frame and like graphics over i think this is the future of mainstream media this is where it's all headed forget skydance buy all the old cbs assets go

[02:49:54] quibi was onto something oh quibi was onto something yeah but it came before tick tock you needed tick tock to succeed because this is just basically like what i'm seeing is just basically chinese quibi and i'm in i'm all in hi this is uh this is benito i i i was i as some people know i lived in the philippines i talked about this pre-show but i've been already approached by many production companies to produce this kind of stuff like this is being churned this is being churned because you

[02:50:24] have a background in video production yeah and i and i have you know i know a lot of people in production around here so like i've been pitched many times by big studios um a lot of the a lot of work is being done here yeah interesting but being produced over there being produced in china or korea you're a hot commodity benito don't take it you don't want to do oh no i don't i don't want to do i don't you'd rather get i have a low-paying job i saw the checks too i saw the checks and it's

[02:50:52] like no no thanks we pay you better than that good all right i'm glad to see uh we are trendsetters here at twit we do follow all the trends you just learned one about uh tiny tick tocks now there's tiny vinyl a new pocketable record format for the spotify age look at it little record oh it's so it's the tick tock of records we used to get these in magazines when i was a kid

[02:51:18] um really that size yeah but they were these are like real vinyl but they these those were just like on plastic and you'd have to weight them down put when you put them on the turntable you do need a turntable for these though in fact look this says linus and lucy maybe it's the old uh peanuts theme so um it's a three inch collectible vinyl first launched in japan 20 years ago oh no no that's the

[02:51:46] old one now this is in five years later a new four inch size format called tiny vinyl wait a minute is this story from oh yeah it's from 2025 it's the new cashing they must have remember they have this casingles yeah they were just little cassettes with one song yeah what a rip off they want to take the miniature vinyl collectible crown and launch partner target is going to sell these 44 titles

[02:52:12] coming in the coming weeks real vinyl records just oh my god see oh go to target.com slash tiny vinyl wow it's real one song per side you do have to have a turntable is it do any of you have turntables no but i would get one for the tiny it might be worth it there's four minutes per side my son has

[02:52:36] one i could play it on his play it on his little fisher price turntable no no he's in his 20s oh okay so so he has like a real you know vinyl like yeah well that's the thing it's 20 somethings that have like stare like like old school stereos with with record players and everything totally and target has a pretty select has a pretty big selection of vinyl already you know they have a lot of vinyl to target do they really yeah that tells you something that tells you vinyls we have two

[02:53:02] vinyl record stores in petaluma too you know where i saw a bunch i don't know if this is only in in louisville but it where i'm based which is books a million books no um half price books half price yeah half price books like they have vinyl for like six bucks and stuff like there's tons and tons of them um also i saw people buying dvds there i i literally went to sell a box of dvds this weekend i was like i've got these old get rid of them get rid of them and they gave me you know i don't know

[02:53:31] 20 bucks or something for a whole bunch of them and um and i saw people there buying them and i was like oh this these are like the people who are like you know forget all of this drm you know stuff and i'm like all right you know fighting a good fight there but but the but i saw all the vinyl they had and and you know vinyls sort of gotten expensive again like they sell it yeah they sell it in places you know it's no 20 bucks 30 bucks a disc exactly exactly uh and and there they were

[02:53:59] much cheaper at half price books i was like okay people don't know like this is the place to go and get all the vinyl this is like the legit vinyl from you know 70s and 80s well maybe this is this tiny vinyl will be the gateway drug to a full-blown vinyl vinyl habit habit these are expensive 15 oh never mind chapel demon hunters though okay okay pop dinner demon hunters golden on one side your

[02:54:29] idol on the other see it's a collectible it's not it's not about the music it's about collecting these things when i was at the apple event i was taking pictures of of tim cook you know with people because he comes and he like holds the iphone poses yeah and then and then they start just bringing in the the sort of influencers right to like to take a photo with them and like i justine comes yeah and i was like okay marquez brown i know that actually not marquez but um then um uh jimmy what's the guy's

[02:54:58] name mr beast uh mr beast was there i saw jimmy there yeah yeah then they start bringing in people and that was where the and my knowledge ended then they brought in a k-pop star and i'm like i know that's which one star yeah i had to text people i i put the photo and then i like you know it wants to know which one come on man i tried to upload it to like i upload his photo to four different llms all four of them told me it was a different one so i was like okay well that's not

[02:55:22] helpful um so so uh it and ended up being oh man i've got to find it um some a human being identified and and told me uh who it was and it was your favorite victoria before we before we reveal it okay so who do you want it to be my old group is exo but i know that they're not there's there's no excel wouldn't be there here they're not there nor would bts be there no no it was not yes i wouldn't be

[02:55:52] there bts is like really in what samsung is like you know yeah they're like big partners with bts right well the samsung will always yoink the biggest of the group so samsung used to have a thing with uh exo they had a thing with bts all google had was the jonas brother yeah that's pathetic i don't even know which jonas brother it was and then they also um felix from strike heads was in the s25 like the

[02:56:18] really skinny phone um campaign so it's like every single time i go to an unpacked i'm like which k-pop star might show up oh that's cool i never get to actually see are you what did you love k-pop hunters was that the greatest ever oh it was so good i love that movie i was really skeptical i was really skeptical because i was like you're just pandering and then i watched it three times and so are you going to watch the reality show that they're going to do with the k-pop stars versus the

[02:56:47] pop stars or whatever um it's a really stacked cast i probably i i need to have apple tv plus so i'll wait until someone comes back and then watch it but uh yeah it's a stacked cast i was quite impressed by yeah they got a lot of big names super all right did you find the name jason did so i hope i don't mispronounce it yunho y-u-n-h-o not one of my groups that's fine okay that's fine probably

[02:57:13] more of an influencer than a star you know what i'm saying it is it says he's a k-pop star but that's i i was not familiar with him but yeah all right so you got your tiny vinyl i got something else for you kodak has announced a key ring camera key ring a little tiny camera maybe that goes on your key ring oh like like a key chain sort of yeah but it's it's it's a digital it's not it's not film it's the

[02:57:40] it's uh it's the kodak charmera uh but and this is smart see they're so smart yeah you buy it it's a blind box for 30 dollars you don't there's seven different ones including a clear one they're boo-booing it they're la boo-booing it blind box is like the mental hack of 2025 like people

[02:58:04] you know it's like hacking into the all of the sort of collector do you have a la boo-boo victoria i have a gas station la foo-foo and i love it oh even better a knockoff la boo-boo i i actually love the la foo-foo is more than i does it smell like petrol no it's just got wonky hands and like a

[02:58:26] very bad um sewing job up on its on its forehead but i i love my gas station la foo-foo uh okay okay wow i hate to bring the gang down but one last story i really should mention which is uh one of our early pioneers uh of podcasting passed away at a very young age or he said to say todd cochran passed away

[02:58:51] at the age of 61 on september 8th todd really gets the title of longest tech pot continuous tech podcaster geek news central predates twit by a few months uh he was a pioneer he founded a couple of podcast companies including blueberry which was very important to podcast uh economics um todd was at the podcast movement my wife uh saw him hung out with him uh he had lost some weight he looked good but

[02:59:18] uh i guess taken by uh heart disease uh at the very very young age of 61. so uh it's very important to mention one of the early pioneers of podcasting todd cochran uh passed away standing on the shoulders of giants yes uh we have concluded this exciting edition and we have learned so much including how young

[02:59:47] people talk we're gonna eat to jupiter soon with your la foo-foo with my gas station la foo-foo there you go victoria you are a gem i want to have you back again and again uh thank you so much i know it's a long show i really appreciate your time thank you thanks for having me this is so much fun you're fantastic reed whenever they come out at some point they're probably maybe maybe not will be

[03:00:14] reviews of some things on the verge.com or follower there will be yeah maybe there you could see something i also have a new newsletter so maybe not i don't know anyway thank you victoria you're a joy i really appreciate your time coming to us from beautiful hackensack new jersey new jersey in the house

[03:00:39] joizy joizy dan pattison my friend my good friend my buddy my pal director of content at blackbird ai don't forget about compass.blackbird.ai it's a free kind of disinformation checker get some context about the stories that you hear uh it's it's only good it's good for you it's good for your your psyche and your knowledge and i thank you so much dan i wish you all the best i know you've got some

[03:01:06] challenges coming in the next few uh days god bless but all all good hang in there so far so good so far so good it's always a pleasure thank you dan yeah great to see you and my old friend jason heiner who once elected me president of the internet and it only cost me 275 million dollars thank you thank you remember i didn't elect you i just data mined the data and then nominated you nominated me

[03:01:33] no nominated you what was the name i'm so glad you you've closed with the compass tool that you know dan is working on a great tool super valuable and what was the one that you mentioned earlier uh that you kagi for now it's five bucks a month to replace google but there's no ads and i pay for the 25 buck a month super duper pro plan and have replaced perplexity with it because they have the kagi assistant

[03:01:58] k-a-g-i.com um it's one of those things where the in crowd is starting to kind of realize just as victoria said that google search is terrible it's pretty broken and we need something broken yeah and uh kagi is uh d is anonymized google plus other sources i think they do a very good job and they're and they are a public benefit company they are not uh they're not for profit they don't do advertising

[03:02:24] they don't do data mining and i think they really do a good job we've interviewed the ceo and i'm very impressed with it that's awesome so i love like we're ending the show and if you take away nothing from the show take away those two things compass and kagi like there's two usable things you can walk away from the show you were entertained and you got like two things that can make you a lot smarter too it's actually oh it's funny you should say that jason because it was always my goal in the radio show and the podcast to have something that you would go home with and go oh yeah i'm

[03:02:53] glad i listened because i learned something that i can use that's a hundred percent jason heiners jam yeah it's a good jam well jason oh yeah jason is one of the real genuine good people in the world he is uh a deep here here deep soul and a brilliant man and i just we just adore you uh you're just the best thank you jason thank you victoria thank you dan thank you especially to our club members who as always

[03:03:17] make this possible your uh contributions to twit they're not tax deductible but your membership in the club uh covers uh 25 of our our production costs now which is fantastic i'd like to see it cover 100 wouldn't that be cool to have the listeners support the show if you like what we do if you get some value out of it if you want to see more of what we do please visit twit.tv club twit lots of benefits

[03:03:44] there's a two-week free trial there are family plans corporate plans starts at ten dollars a month you also get access to our discord which is a social network that's good for you where you'll get lots of benefit and none of the awfulness um twit.tv slash club twit please join the club we'd love to have you we do twit every sunday from 2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 p.m eastern that's 2100 utc and i mentioned that because you can watch it live we stream uh the production of

[03:04:13] most of our shows live of course we do it in the club twit discord uh but many uh many people also watch on youtube uh live again youtube.com twitch twitch.tv tick tock yes we're on tick tock we're on x.com we're on facebook linkedin we're even on kick out of australia so if you want to watch a show live you can most people don't because it's not convenient you should be able to listen or

[03:04:40] watch whenever you feel like it that's why we make audio and video available free on our website twit.tv there's a youtube channel dedicated to video great way to share clips if you want to share you know the insight on victoria's gas station la foo foo you could share that with your dearest friends just clip it on youtube it's very easy to do and everybody has youtube best way to subscribe as with any podcast that's why we have an rss feed go to a podcast client there's so many good ones

[03:05:07] pocket casts overcast apple podcasts and on and on and subscribe it's free to subscribe you'll get it automatically audio or video or both uh as soon as we're done just in time for your monday morning commute thank you everybody for being here thank you victoria dan thank you jason have a wonderful evening and uh as i've said for 20 years now another twit is in the can bye you you you