TWiT 1055: The Garden of Thorns - AWS Outage Exposes Our Cloud Dependency

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Doc Rock is here. Richard Campbell from Windows Weekly and .NET Rocks. We're going to talk about the Amazon outage. Wow, what a mess that turned out to be. We'll also talk about the TikTok deal. It's apparently going to happen on Thursday. And foreign hackers breached the US nuclear weapons plant. That and a whole lot more coming up next on TWiT.

[00:00:26] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT. This Week in Tech, Episode 1055, recorded Sunday, October 26th, 2025. The Garden of Thorns. It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. We were going to have Stacey on the show today.

[00:00:54] Stacey Higginbotham. But she's on an island in the middle of the Pacific Northwest and there is no power. And so she couldn't join us. But that's okay because we have two other people who could be on an island. There's Doc Rock. I believe you're on an island. I'm absolutely on an island. Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Doc, it's great to see you. We used to say that in a radio station. We used to say somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in a little grass shack. That was our title.

[00:01:22] Do you ever get island fever? Like, do you ever freak out that you're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away from civilization? No, because I'm a very weird... I'm going to say something that nobody believes. And it took me a long time to convince my family. But I am broken. I am 100% fearless. The only thing I'm afraid of is rats because I grew up in the East Coast and them suckers are huge. It's sensible. Sensible. Because they have no fur on their tails. That's creepy.

[00:01:49] Yeah. So growing up in a house with a bunch of scared people, like I just went out of my way not to even think about things like that. So I'll probably be the idiot that dies first when the zombies come because I don't have a fear muscle. Nothing scares them. Nothing scares them. With this also from Utrecht in Holland. Am I saying that right, Richard Campbell? Well, this is not the state of Holland, but it is the Netherlands. So... Wait a minute. Now I'm really confused. Oh yeah. In my youth, we called it Holland. Right. But it really is the Netherlands.

[00:02:16] Yeah. There are multiple provinces of the Netherlands, one of which is Holland. Why do we call it Holland? Well, because, you know, that's where... Americans. Because we're Americans. Yeah. That's what it is. You're in the Netherlands, the Low Country. It's great to have you. Richard, normally, of course, it'd be up in Madeira Park, British Columbia, but is on the road. Which people often mistake for an island, but is not. It's a peninsula. You are not? You're on the water? Yeah.

[00:02:42] You're on the water though, but you are part of the landmass. Mm-hmm. So how many, show of hands, how many of you, for instance, had an eight-sleep bed that wouldn't recline because of the Amazon power or outage? We learned a lesson, didn't we, this week about how much we are relying on an AWS. Well, most, especially East One, because it's the original. Ah. So, you know.

[00:03:10] Yeah. So I didn't notice it that much. When was the outage? It was 15 hours. It was a long outage according to ours. Do we know when it was? It was, uh, Ookla said the down detector service received more than 17 million reports of disrupted services offered by 3,500 organizations. The three biggest countries where reports were, uh, were, uh, originated were the US, the UK and Germany. Snapchat was down.

[00:03:41] Roblox was down. And AWS was down. Of course, because that was an AWS outage. Uh, Amazon now says the root cause it's always DNS, isn't it? Yeah. If it's not BGP, it's DNS. This was a weird DNS. It was a database, right? I thought it was Bravo, Bravo database or something like that. It was DynamoDB. Dynamo, there you go.

[00:04:14] Dynamo, there you go. You know, they had what is, uh, famously known in computer science as a race condition, which is one of my favorite errors. First of all, because it's, you can't predict it. It's kind of, uh, chaotic. Uh, it's when two, two, uh, threads, two, uh, processes race each other and it's unpredictable who's going to win the race.

[00:04:37] So, uh, the settings are conflicting and a race condition is a notoriously difficult thing to discover because, uh, you know, unless you really careful about locking each of the threads, uh, it can happen. Yeah. So, uh, the, uh, DynamoDBs DNS management system, which is used for the load balancing periodically creates, it's an automated system, new DNS configurations.

[00:05:02] This is from, uh, Ars Technica based on reporting from AWS creates new, uh, DNS configurations for endpoints within AWS, like AWS East. Uh, because two of them tried to do the same thing, the race condition resided in the DNS enactor. Uh, it went cuckoo is the technical term.

[00:05:28] Uh, the old instance to race, the new entries and the new instance to race, the older entries. No, no entries. They fought. It's after you, Alphonse. No, after you, Alphonse. No, after you Alphonse and nothing ever worked. So that's, so yeah, it was DNS, but only cause there was no DNS. Right. So then that according to them, again, this is a great story at Ars Technica. The damage resulting from the failure, then put a strain on EC2, which was located in US East one.

[00:05:57] Even after DynamoDB was restored, this is the problem with these. They're all reliant upon each other. There was a cascading failure. EC2 worked through quote, a significant backlog of network state propagations, which needed to be put in. And then, in the last one, it was a lot of the data that was processed. Amazon's engineers went on to say, while new EC2 instances could be launched successfully, they would not have the necessary network connectivity. Due to delays in the network state propagation. In other words, no DNS, no connectivity. Yeah.

[00:06:27] So I launched it. You just can't talk to it. Just sit there. Well, you have this situation where you bring your service up, but there's so much backlog of traffic that it immediately knocks the service back down again. Yeah. So you're kind of like, what do we do? Like, I know we need to turn it on, but every turn it on, it kills it.

[00:06:54] So you've got to kind of throttle traffic, get it fully started. We don't wait a minute to let it warmed up enough that it can take more traffic on. Like I mean, time the backlog just keeps getting bigger. Yeah. And the engineers are sitting there. It reminds me of something like Chernobyl and the HPO, uh, uh, kind of fictionalized story of Chernobyl where you're watching the, uh, the nuclear reactor engineers look at it. And they just, there's, it's like, it's a cascading series of failures.

[00:07:24] It's that, it's that look of, uh, uh, yeah. The, uh, oh, right. And what's, what's crazy is so, uh, I mean, it's probably Manassas or one of the other places a little bit up there in Virginia. My sister doesn't live too far from an Amazon data center and it's, they, they've been building these for a long time, but now there's so many. And if you look into like Richmond and Norfolk has a big one, of course, because of the naval base and things like that.

[00:07:54] It's weird that it started in just such a small little place that otherwise is very mundane. Like Manassas is a very chill part of Virginia. A lot of not, not a, not a lot going on, but behind the trees, everything you do, everything you care about, your mattress is controlled by a building behind these trees. So it's, it's uncanny in so many ways, but then it also goes to show you how tied in we are.

[00:08:24] Well, and that's already having a problem with data centers affecting residential neighborhoods, but like, yo, we kind of need the data center. So like, what are we going to do? Well, and also maybe we should be more resilient. Like why is a mattress calling out to Amazon web services before it can recline? Even if it is, why isn't it got a backup one? Right. I think a lot of cases here, which you're seeing is people just found out there if this stuff was misconfigured because it should have failed to another section or to a different region, including a bunch of Amazon's own services.

[00:08:53] But that's pretty typical with these sort of originals is that you still have some old stuff there. You haven't quite balanced out across the new networks yet, and you find it out the hard way. Yeah. This is what you realize that when the thing went out, you couldn't put your back up. That was the problem. The mattress was stuck. Too late. Yes. My, I have to say my mat, my Helix sponsor, but I'll say it anyway, my Helix mattress has a little, it's funny when I set it up, the, it has a recliner.

[00:09:19] It has a little adapter for a nine volt battery so that if the power goes out, you can still recline it, which I thought that's a thoughtful little thing. I didn't connect the battery, but I know that that's there and I guess I could run downstairs, get an nine volt battery for stuck. Yeah. My thing has some kind of LG Bluetooth in it. I don't use it. I just use the controller, the little remote that comes with it. But my phone, if I go to Bluetooth to add something new, I always see these two LG cause I have a split King. Yeah.

[00:09:49] And I see these two LG Bluetooth devices that want to talk to my phone. And I was like, why do I want Bluetooth connect my mattress? There's no speaker, but I guess it was so that there's an app that you can use the speaker in positions. And see, that's part of the problem. Everybody wants an app. Yeah. Not because it's better for the end user, but because that's better for them because they can, they get information from your phone. Telemetry. Telemetry. But from, you know, as an, as a home assistant a fictionado, one of my basic tests is unplug the internet.

[00:10:19] How does your house, see what happens? Oh, what a great idea. Everybody right now go unplug your internet. No, wait a minute. Don't. No, no. I need to do this week. I'm trying to set up home assistant. And of course I have a bunch of Macs. So I'm like, I, I'm not going to do it on the mini cause I heard so many weird things about doing it on a Mac. So I have an old Lenovo notebook and I pulled it out and I tried to get it on with Ubuntu and it just will not behave like it is acting.

[00:10:45] So I'm thinking, should I buy a yellow or a green or whatever the heck that thing Leo has in his hand now? This is it. This is, you know why I have this? Cause Richard Campbell, a guy named Richard Campbell told me, get the H a green. Just get a green. And then I also got the little. I don't know if I need this. The ZBT one. This is for thread. I think. Yeah. The sky, the sky connected. It needs to be on that cable. So it's away from the USB controller. Yeah. Cause it's not optional. You'll look at it and go, that's stupid. Plug this sky connected in there. And then wonder why nothing works. Yeah.

[00:11:15] No, you need that. But then I just disconnected it. So nobody can turn off the lights. That's better than buying a nook. I mean, you can do all of that. It is kind of a nook. Yeah. But what's nice about those little O droids is no spinning fans. Right. Made for the purpose. Like pre-configured when you're not happy with it. I'm plugging, plug it back in again. Like there's nothing to do. You just did by the way. I got enough stuff to take care of. I just want to work on things that, that I can be away for a week and they don't break. And that's what that thing does.

[00:11:45] Oh, that's brilliant. I did the crazy thing. I went to Home Depot. They had a sale. I should have known better. I was in a rush about to leave on a trip to come to Boston. And I bought 40 whiz bulbs because my other ones were slowly starting to die. Yeah. And Apple Home and whiz are not friends. They're not friends. They hate each other. They like bought to be back in the safe way. But HA is your bridge for all of that. Right? Like HA is a good job for it. And then you have an HA app on the phone, right? And that's what your master controller now. Done. It's not the prettiest app I've ever seen. No, you can make it prettier if you care.

[00:12:14] I've seen people do, you know, kind of dashboards on tablets and stuff. They hang on the wall. There's things to do. So you nailed it, which is that US East one is the oldest AWS. That's it. End point. So there's, this is what Ookla said. The affected US East one is AWS is oldest and most heavily used hub. Regional concentration means even global apps often anchor identity, state or metadata flows there. Yeah.

[00:12:44] When a regional dependency fails, as was the case in this event that impacts worldwide because many global stacks go through Virginia at some point, just as you said, doc, behind those trees, the whole world, even Germany is being controlled. You know, cause you can hear that sucker and you can feel it. It's not that you can hear it. The hearing part, it depends on how old you are, but you can feel it. Like your bones vibrate. Yeah.

[00:13:12] Yeah. The, a lot of the subsea cables across the Atlantic land at Reston, Virginia. So that is where the internet comes from Europe into the US. Wow. And so that's why data centers get positioned there because you're close to the backbone that stretches across the ocean. So, uh, good on Dan Gooden. I'll give him credit. Very good piece. Uh, in ours, technically explaining, uh, the whole thing and the dependence, uh, we all have on, uh, on AWS. And I guess we learned a lesson.

[00:13:42] All this happens from time to time. In fact, inevitably I'll hear from the people say, see, this is why the cloud is a bad idea. I don't think that the cloud is a bad idea. Now this is misconfiguration on the customer's part. You need to be able to not have us East in your life. You need to have any given center, not be in your life and you still function or you're not credible. Like that's what the job is, is to, you know, you're building resiliency and resiliency means I don't care what centers down. We still work and degrade gracefully.

[00:14:11] Right. At the minimum, those beds response to, I can't connect is to go flat. Yeah. Right. That's not a big piece of software. Correct. Degrade gracefully. That's, that's, that's kind of my hope. My later, we're all trying, Leo. We're all trying. Some services are going offline, but at least they're degrading gracefully. Well, I want to clear something up in my head for nobody else. Just in case anybody else missed it. When you say customer and you mean end user or customer as in Helix mattress company.

[00:14:41] Yeah. I mean, really Helix should be, you know, if I wasn't Helix by the way, it was Casper or not Casper eight sleep, eight sleep. That gives you a trouble with another former picking an app. My bad. But if I'm the eight sleep it guy, part of my job is to know what happens when something offline. Yeah. So my, you know, as the old it guy who's been through this a few times when I look at what's going on in here, it's like, this is a configuration failure, right? I don't even know what's gone wrong with Amazon, but for my responsibility to my company, I should

[00:15:10] not be subjected to that. I should be able, my configuration should tolerate it. We are an interesting situation. We actually, I think we talked about this, maybe it was on Mac break weekly or windows weekly, Richard, of course, a regular on windows weekly with Paul Therott. But a single point of failure is kind of what's going on right now with the EU, with the courts, with Epic, with Google, with Apple, the single, the choke point is the app store.

[00:15:35] And we've set it up now that these most important computing devices in our lives, which is our smartphones, whether it's, it's Apple or Android essentially are controlled entirely by an app store, which is controlled by a single entity. And it's, it's a very, very, very important entity, which means that entity is vulnerable, whether it's to the U.S. government or to the EU.

[00:16:00] Cory Doctorow has a good piece on this, the Mad King's digital kill switch, he called it in his pluralistic blog. Cory's really a master of the language. But what he's talking about is this is a kill switch in effect for any government that can go to Apple. It's certainly a kill switch for Apple. Google, historically Android has had kind of a back door because they've allowed you to sideload.

[00:16:27] But Google in the last month has started to change that by requiring that even third party apps, the developers have to be notarized by Google, have to be approved by Google. So even F Droid and these other third party app stores will ultimately be routed through in effect Google. And Google has a kill switch now on everybody, on every app running on Android, just as Apple does.

[00:16:52] And while I trust Apple and Google, well, I sort of do. I mean, this comes up and Cory's reminding us about Apple and Google both pulling down ice apps like ice block. Apple also removed a an app that didn't tell people where ice was, but merely recorded or stored videos of ice in action.

[00:17:23] Google's and Apple both said that ice was a protected class. And which I don't think is really what the point of protected classes are. And so we're going to pull all of those apps, not just the apps that say, here's where ice is right now, but the apps that have recordings of ice action. We're going to pull those all off the app store. And he says, that's the problem now is, again, and I'll say Cory is outspoken.

[00:17:54] He says, of course, iPhones can technically run apps that Apple doesn't want you to run. All you have to do is jailbreak your phone and install an independent app store. Just one problem, the US trade rep bullied every country in the world into banning jailbreaking. Meaning that if Trump, a man who never met a grievance that was too petty to pursue, orders Tim Cook, a man who never found a boot he wouldn't lick. Okay, this is a little over the top. To remove apps from your country's app store, you won't be able to get those apps from anyone else.

[00:18:24] That is a single point of failure. And I think it has the same kind of fundamental flaw that we saw here with AWS. When you have a single point of failure, you're vulnerable. Now I got to tell you that this is my month in Europe traveling. I've been in Lisbon and Oslo and Stavanger and Trondheim and now in the Netherlands. I've never seen so many people talking about how do I be independent of American cloud products. Big tech. Yes. Not just cloud products, but big tech in general.

[00:18:53] They're very concerned about US companies because they're watching US company behavior right now and saying, my employer doesn't want me to be subject to this. Yeah. That's a weird thought when you think about it. And it's weird. Cause like we complain every day in the office. Don't tell Ken and Glenn, but they were like, we're not going to do any like Ecamm email on Google products. So we have to, we use like a rack space thing, which drives me crazy. Cause it's missing all the cool stuff that, you know, Gmail has.

[00:19:21] And of course, like now I use notion mail is a killer client. I can't use it with my Ecamm email account. So I still have to depend on Apple mail, which just irritates me with funny from the Apple guy. And now when you see stuff like what's going on right now, you kind of get it. Like there, there was paranoia to me five years ago. Kind of makes sense. You know, you, that's, it just seems like you see this coming from a whole bunch of places.

[00:19:47] And I'm hearing more and more people say that, like, how do we, how do we get to this particular point? Even to the point where Jack from Patreon is like telling people, put their phone down. I'm like, wait, Jack, you make all your money from people being on their phone. But he's like, yeah, some of y'all need to chill out. Corey talks about, I remember when, um, uh, Russians stole Ukrainian tactics, tractors and drove them to Chechnya, but they were all John Deere tractors.

[00:20:13] And so Deere remotely bricked them, which he says, a lot of us cheered that high tech comeuppance. But when you consider that Donald Trump or another government could, well, I guess not another, the U S government could order Deere to do this to all the tractors. This gets a lot more, uh, sinister. Uh, we talked about this during the CSAM. It was a very similar kind of, you know, process.

[00:20:36] Like, you know, any one company can just, you know, especially when you consider the current administration and you consider what they were trying to do with CSAM. And they could be like, look, well, we're going to stop your, you know, such and such merger if you don't just like completely blend the yellow and black sites from all devices that you made. So what do we, what, I mean, did we take a wrong turn in technology by allowing this or it's not too late, isn't it? I mean, I can use, I guess I could use open source software. I could use Linux.

[00:21:06] Uh, there aren't any really good, uh, open source phones. People have been trying the fair phone is close. Yeah. But it's sorry, you know, we've had periods where we've had more open source options and so forth. Of course there's ways. There's no reason we couldn't start jailbreaking again. It's just most people don't want to work that hard. The app store is awfully convenient. Right. Uh, and they, you know, the resistance to jailbreaking has got more to do with enforcement than it has to do with technical problems. Right.

[00:21:31] So, you know, it all depends on where we get to on this, but it's, uh, it has people double, you know, thinking twice about an awful lot of their dependencies and just saying like, are, what are we prepared to explain? Yeah. It's just as this AWS outage probably did the same thing for a lot of companies. Um, yeah. Can it, I mean, the reality here is multiple cloud would have helped, but it wasn't actually the problem. Multiple region is all you actually needed. Right.

[00:21:57] And I just wonder how many of those it folks thought they were multi-region and only found out when the most important region went down. Oh, there's one service only in us East and then nothing works. Wow. Well, that's typically an authentication engine, any of those things. Oh yeah. No, this, like I said, there's a big configuration wave coming here. Cause you just found out what sole dependency you had on us East, including a bunch, I think of Amazon services themselves.

[00:22:28] Like it wasn't just the products. I mean, okay. So there, there's a way out. We're not stuck in this. No. I mean, it is a reminder. You haven't tested efficiently. The problem is often the convenience overrides. I see what you did there. I know. I do it all the time. I can't do that anymore.

[00:22:56] Convenience overrides, uh, convenience overrides, uh, prudence. It's, it's just more convenient. It's easier. It's simpler. And so people often kind of, uh, by default choose convenience. It's the, it's in a way, another way of talking about the tyranny of the default. It's just a hundred percent. It's just the way it is. Example. Here's the exact example. So I'm sitting here Sunday night and I'm ready to publish YouTube video. And yeah, it's kind of late because we have family stuff.

[00:23:21] It was about 10 o'clock and I'm, I've been on Photoshop since version one, like before it was an Adobe product even. And I make my thumbnails for YouTube in Adobe express because it's just easier, right? Like I could absolutely do it in Photoshop. And I was trying to do some edits and like the page started tripping and I was like, what the heck is going on? So it got to the point where I actually went on to threads and X and I said, Hey Adobe, like what's cracking with express? Like it's absolutely not working.

[00:23:50] And they were like, Oh, can you check these endpoints for us? And so that was the beginning of the spiral. And then as I, you know, been on the net longer, my YouTube video didn't upload, which never happens. Like it always uploads and it's done. And I was like, this is really strange. But then I found out, you know, when I woke up the next day that yeah, basically the East Coast was like, we're not sending any data this way. But it's funny because all I had to do was just close express and go to Photoshop and finish my dang thumbnail.

[00:24:19] It would have taken me 10 seconds, but I got stuck as a computer person trying to solve the problem instead of going to my fail safe, which in a way it goes to what Richard said about a configuration problem. Even in our heads, something as simple as this is not working. Let me stop. Let me go grab the 316 because it works just as good as a 13 millimeter. If you jiggle it right, you sit there, you try so hard to make that 13 millimeter work. And it's like, bro, grab the 316.

[00:24:48] You're not jiggling it right. Yeah. That's not the exact thing. I'd rather go to the store and buy another bit, right? Like, yeah, yeah, 100%. 100%. I never tried that. I'll have to try that. All right. Well, let's take a little break. Oh, one more kind of footnote to that. Thursday, this morning on CBS's Face the Nation, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that Trump and she will consummate the TikTok deal.

[00:25:16] I hope they do that in public. Who gets prima nocta in this? I don't even know. That's a good question. Yeah. Who's the virgin is the question. I'm even sad I brought it up. I apologize. Sorry, most people don't speak Latin. So you're safe. So I guess we'll find out Thursday exactly what the deal is. I know what the U.S. has said the deal is, but China's never said that's the way it is. So we'll find out.

[00:25:44] The outlines of the deal are that TikTok will be in the United States 80% owned by non-Chinese, but not all American investors. Mm-hmm. That the data will be stored in the U.S. on Oracle servers. This is Project Texas. That's been going on for some time. And that TikTok will now move to a new app in the U.S., the U.S. version of TikTok. I don't know what it'll be called.

[00:26:12] I know there's some question in my mind about whether TikTokers will care enough to move or. And I'm sure that really going to convince a hundred million kids to change a class. Yeah, I think that's interesting. I mean, you know, my son who started, you know, TikTok really made his career, started on TikTok, but was wise enough to also have a presence on Instagram. It's not as big and on YouTube. It's not as big. So he's on all, you know, as one should be, as we are.

[00:26:39] You should be on as many platforms as possible, right? Everywhere your viewers are, right? You would agree with that, Doc. I know you're a YouTuber. Yeah. And I agree that he puts some kind of crack in them pickles. Buy more pickles. I am an investor in the pickle business. I talk to Saul Hank the other day. He said, yeah, I don't think the pickle business is going anywhere. I said, son, that's my investment. Can you transfer it over to the sandwich shop?

[00:27:09] Because that's going great. No, no, dad, you invested in the pickles. Anyway, no, I don't. I'm happy to help Henry out. Not that he needs. I need his help more than he needs mine at this point. But it's smart. But my point is, yeah, exactly. My point is, you know, I think he'll keep doing TikTok. Why would he stop? He's already on Insta. And if there's two TikTok clients, so you post on both.

[00:27:38] Will you be able in the United States to post on the Chinese? It's not Chinese. The global TikTok. Yeah. What will happen? Well, that there is nothing. You know, there haven't been able to do with the little, uh, be a little bit of VPN action. You're good. Look, I'm from Switzerland. Let me post. Yeah. There'll be some raspberry pie. It's like splitting your apps based on blockage. You know, I should ask every, just ask every teenager in Australia, every kid in the UK.

[00:28:07] Oh, not in Australia. December 10th. They're not allowed to use social media if you're under 16. My goodness. How is that going to go? And will I do? How is that going to go? Can you imagine taking a 15 year old who has a very elaborate social life curated on Instagram and meta and Snapchat and being told by the federal government, the government in Australia. No, you've got to abandon those accounts.

[00:28:37] Their suggestion, by the way, they have a whole page of ways to wean your teenager off of social media. Their suggestion is have them schedule regular phone calls with their friends. There you go. Like it's 1973. What the hell? What? What? The checklist is very short. Select a VPN provider. Configure account for another country. We were asking you a question. Which VPNs are publicly traded so we can make a little loot. Yeah. This might be the time.

[00:29:07] December 10th is the cutoff. A couple of dollars into each room because they're all going to do well. Last week Harper Reid was on the show and is a hacker. He said, that's how hackers are born. You know? Yes. They just told us to hack. You're going to have a... Actually, it's probably good for Australia. You're going to have a whole generation that is mastering technology because they want to use Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok. And the bigger thing that these guys never think of, and this is being a problem right now.

[00:29:34] Remember the malware that's cutting through YouTube videos and they're putting it in because they're like, oh, here's how you cheat at Roblox. And if you go to this app and download this, you can get like unlimited money. Hold that thought. We're going to talk about that. Yeah. There's a whole section of YouTube stuff coming up. We got a YouTuber in the house, man. Doc Rock at Doc Rock on the YouTube. He also is a director of strategic partnerships at Ecamm. And we are thrilled to have him.

[00:30:04] We use Ecamm as you know, Doc. We're using it right now and love it and love it. And Richard Campbell's also here, host of Windows Weekly, .NET Rocks and Runners Radio. He has three podcasts, ladies and gentlemen, and he still finds time to travel the world. What are you talking about in Utrecht? I've got my the Internet, the undersea infrastructure talk, the new one. Oh, very cool.

[00:30:29] Which we're doing data as well as electrical and polar petroleum oil, lubricant products. Of course, we have to talk a little about the Baltic Sea incidents in that. But really, you know, reminding people that, you know, I think Starlink's very cool. It's also moves about 1% of Internet traffic. 98 of it moves under the sea. Wow. By the way, I do have Starlink as my redundancy, my backup for my landline cable Internet.

[00:30:56] So that if Comcast goes out, I've got Starlink. They just arrested in Myanmar one of these, God, I don't know what you call them, these prison camps that they use for people to do pig butchering. They get overseas workers to come and take their passports and force them to send out these phony text messages. And they just arrested. And they just arrested. I don't know why, because Myanmar has basically been looking the other way.

[00:31:26] The, you know, the government there is not exactly. They're basically, I don't know how you put it, friends of the West. But they just they just shut this down. And there was a picture. Let me see if I can find it of the of the the Myanmar police standing over dozens of Starlink. All right.

[00:31:55] I mean, Myanmar is run by a military junta. It's a junta. You know, a group of generals who rule under martial law. Yeah, this might be related to the fact that SpaceX is pulling the plug on those Starlink satellites. So maybe they were no longer functioning. So the ruling junta said, all right, we're going to pretend to shut these guys down. There you go. Since we can't use they can't use them anymore. You will see.

[00:32:22] I got a pig butchering text message this morning from somebody saying, hey, I missed our golf date. Can we make another one? I don't play golf. Oh, my God. I get some of the most hilarious ones. They're so funny. I was really tempted to say something like, oh, I'm at the club right now. I can't. I want to imply that I'm really wealthy and I'm stupid.

[00:32:48] And maybe that would like continue because the whole point of these right is that eventually they say, hey, I got a great crypto deal. Maybe you'd want to get in on it. You know, so they can get some money out of you. When I got one of those and I was being a dumb and I was playing along with him in this email. And then I was like, yo, don't worry. I got as much money as you want. Like, just let me know. Like, what do you mean you guys want to be like? What do you do? I was like, oh, yeah, I'm the Nigerian Prince from all of those emails. Did he hang up? 100%.

[00:33:16] I don't play with these guys because I know that many of them are really slave labor, you know, that they're kind of trapped there and forced to do this. So there's a great guy on YouTube that you can see where he calls them. You know, some of them he therapies and don't get him in trouble, but he tells them to get out of there because he's going to send the authorities. And some of them that are just weird, like he just gets him. He calls them by their first name and he's like, oh, I can see you in the camera. You're sitting right next to like Richard and Leo and they start trying to, you know, unplug everything. It's really funny.

[00:33:47] All right, let's let's take a little break and we will come back. We'll talk about the 3000 YouTube videos that are malware traps. Holy cow. Holy cow. Just a bit. You're watching this week in tech. We're glad you're here today. Our show today brought to you by deal. A new sponsor. I want to welcome them to the network. If you've ever wanted to hire an engineer overseas, you know, get it really excited here. This guy's really good. He really talented.

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[00:35:42] How can a YouTube video be malware? Cause what they do. Okay. So the video basically says, okay, like say you're playing, you know, we farm or whatever, and you want to get free farm berries. If you go to the link in the bottom, you could download the link. The hack, right? And it's a Dropbox link or already, you know, insanity.

[00:36:03] But when you tell kids that their worth is based on how well they can play some particular game, Call of Duty, Roblox. I forget the other one just went out of my head for a second that my nephew plays with Minecraft. Minecraft. There we go. How could you forget Minecraft? My no idea, bro. I am. I am almost 60. That's how the, the, but you tell these kids that their worth is. Their worth is based on how well they play these sort of games or whatever. Right.

[00:36:31] And at some point in time, they're like, okay, I need a leg up. And that's how way back, you know, when we first had the app store, you were having parents with $1,200 bills of buying smurf berries from some, you know, app. And this is terrible because people don't know this stuff. And, you know, they didn't grow up like us where we were tech savvy enough to know you don't get, you know, when someone says, hey, you can get the whole Star Wars movie. If you click this, we knew better. Like that wasn't the move.

[00:36:59] You went to, you know, LimeWire or some Torrent site, but you didn't go to these other sites that promise to hook you up type thing. And unfortunately, as smart as they are about tech, they're all this stuff. And these are probably eight year olds. They're 10 year olds. They're kids. They're really little kids. Yeah. And that's so the it's the code name, the YouTube ghost network by checkpoint. Google has removed a majority of these videos, but you know, you, it's like a whack a mole. You remove them, but a thousand more appear immediately.

[00:37:28] They've been doing this for years since 2021. According to this story from the hacker news, it uses hacked accounts. So it's taking legit accounts with that have some probably have some reputation and replacing the content with malicious videos. What looks like a helpful tutorial, according to checkpoint can actually be a polished cyber trap. All right. Well, teach your kids, I guess.

[00:37:57] I don't know what, how, what do you do? I mean, you can't kind of surprise their tools can't do things like it walks you through how to disable defender. So it won't actually block. Oh Lord. It's a pretty clear click cues. It says if this saw, if this video is telling you to do this, this is not a good video. The problem is, it's not just the kids don't understand this kind of stuff. So many of the parents don't understand this kind of stuff because we all know when we were coming up and we were the nerds and you would try to help your friends and tell them, these are the things that you need to know.

[00:38:26] They would always say like, yeah, I don't want to know that kind of stuff. I just want to turn it on. I just want to use Excel and I want to do my files. I want to cut it off. And I'm like, no, it's not like that. It's like saying, I want to drive a car and not know how to change the tire. But then they go, oh, I got AAA. Would it help if the kids didn't use Windows or if they were using a Chromebook or an iPad or something that these stealers don't work on? Unfortunately, the graphics cards don't work well enough on those sort of machines. Oh, so they have to use Windows. Okay, let's put it this way.

[00:38:52] You and I both know the best game machine in the world would probably be a Mac, but because it's a little safer. Right. But we don't even have the graphics capabilities for the way the games are written, right? We are perfectly fine in Final Cut and After Effects and, you know, folding proteins. And most of the time, the reason these things work is because it's not on the kid's computer. It's on dad's computer or mom's computer. Because these are info stealers. They're crypto stealers. The kid doesn't have anything worth stealing.

[00:39:21] But usually the parent whose computer they're using does. And if you have your house network set up in a way where you haven't set up a VLAN for your kids. Yes. If it gets on the kid's computer, it just went out. Yeah. So like, yo, my niece is on her own little VLAN. Ain't got nothing to do with the rest of us. Like I can see stuff and I can control it, but she's in the VLAN and she's smart. But even her, she recently had a friend send her a message in the text saying that they lost their phone. This is their new phone.

[00:39:51] Keep this number. And oh, I'm trying to say this thing on IG, but it won't let me tag you. What's the password to your IG account? And she did it. And she called me like two seconds later was like, I think I just did something dumb. And so she lost her whole entire IG account and had to start all over. And this is at 15 with the nerd uncle who taught her all of this stuff. And she still got caught up in the emotion of helping out a friend who obviously the person who was, you know, setting them up knew their whole little.

[00:40:21] Sure. Like who's doing what that the friends are having problems with their, their parents or whatever, because they're, you know, let's say alphabet and you know, parents didn't like that. Right. You know, and yeah, so they played them, played them 100%. And I'm like, and so we're thinking about what Richard said for these kids playing the game. Imagine these guys are getting smart enough, especially on tick tock where a lot of it can just be in a chat in the tick tock. Right.

[00:40:46] You put in some, you know, cosplay girl that has way too impressive body parts for the age group. But the boys that are watching it at 13 and they see the QR code that comes up and says, if you do this, you can get better on Fortnite. They're just going to screenshot it, go there, download that thing to their phone and then connect it to the house wifi. And then now they got everything like this is legit what they can do. Wow.

[00:41:14] I remember, I remember periodically going into the kids computers and wiping them and getting rid of all the malware. And then, you know, I mean, this is a, anybody who's known as somebody who's computer literate is going to get called by friends, neighbors, and you're going to go over there and you're going to go over there and you're going to go over there. You're going to find a machine that is just a mess. Just a mess. Every time. Right. All we had was dad's hitters and magazines in the foot chest at the end of the bed.

[00:41:42] It was so much easier, much easier. I was telling the story of jobs is old thoughts on flash letter and how he, he, you know, he really, yeah. And it was cause the flash was killing the iPad for battery. Like this is never meant for that. But he was also, you know, part of his complaint was the old browser plugin model was a catastrophe. For security. Yeah. And whenever. Yeah. And people are like, I don't remember. It's like, do you remember every Christmas going over to your parents' place and replacing their address bars?

[00:42:12] Cause every address bar had been malwareed out. Every one of them. They have Bonzi buddy on there. And everyone, you know, that was just normal. Thanksgiving is coming. I know you've had your Thanksgiving already in Canada. Yeah. But for Americans, we're going to all be going to relatives houses. We will be doing that exact. Sure. I used to just put together the USB keys, you know, be ready to go every machine. Yeah. You bring the boot disc and go, go fix everything. Oh, that was so good. And you can never fix it completely.

[00:42:41] You know, there's always. You just trying to just, you're just scraping the croft off as much as you can hope for. It's probably how dental hygienists feel every six months, you know, we're going to do our best, but if you don't floss, we can't help you. What can I do? Cover story. I don't know if you saw this doc on the Hollywood reporter cover story, the over 10 trillion served.

[00:43:03] And it's, I think the only one I recognize here, these are obviously all huge YouTube stars is Marquez Brownlee, but you probably recognize a few more of those. And Trixie, Trixie's over there. Trixie with a wig. Trixie. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big wig. It's, it's, so this is so impressive right now is I, I have recently been, I got coached YouTubers who are trying to, you know, get their channels together. Most of them are Gen Xers.

[00:43:29] And I told them to do an exercise for me because they, you know, they're still stuck on our generation is very stuck on trying to get it perfect. Like everybody wants to look like Leo, right? They want a nice setup. They want all this stuff. And it's nice of you to say so. I wish I looked like Leo. I say, Hey, go, go to your history and look at what you watch when you're watching on television. You don't care.

[00:44:18] Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a connection, just a sense of something that we enjoy. So if you were rebuilding an SE 30, put a camera up, you don't got to say nothing and just sit there and work on your SE 30 in silence and watch how much people watch it. Like, it's kind of nuts. You'll find five, 600 people staring at you, try to put together an old SE 30. 20. If you happen to talk, you'll double that amount of people. 20 years ago. This was the first YouTube video uploaded. All right. So here we are in front of the elephants.

[00:44:49] Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trumps. The first YouTube video, just some guy at the zoo. You know it was a dating app first, right? Huh? It was a dating app first. Oh, is that the plan? Okay. That was the plan. Uh, this is, this is one of the founders, uh, Javed Kareem. Uh, I remember interviewing Steve Chen.

[00:45:14] In fact, before they sold to Google, when I was up in Canada doing a call for help in Canada, we talked to Steve Chen. Or maybe you would, no, no, actually it wasn't. It was on, uh, one of our shows on Twitter and it was on net at night or something like that. And I said, what are you going to do? You're getting sued, uh, mercilessly by NBC. You know, almost all the content that's up there that's successful on YouTube was from, uh, Saturday Night Live and other big shows. And he didn't see, he seemed fairly sanguine. He must've been already had gone to the, where was it?

[00:45:44] They met at a Denny's or something with, with Sergey and Larry. And, uh, they were about to get purchased for, I don't know, a billion or so. Um, it's 20 years later. Um, and this is the story, uh, really interesting story.

[00:45:59] Uh, it's, it's fascinating to me that Hollywood Reporter, which is kind of, you know, the Bible of Hollywood, of, of the, of the, of the U.S. cultural, you know, Mecca of Hollywood TV and video is saying YouTube just ate TV and it's only getting started. And putting that on the cover, the new fame, 50 hottest influencers on the planet, over 10 trillion served in only two decades.

[00:46:27] YouTube has grown from a user generated circus to the most powerful entertainment platform on earth. Yes. They have an interview with the CEO. And, and one of the things Mullen says is, uh, we are now more popular than the TV. More people watch YouTube now on their big screen TV in their living room than watch regular television. Sure. And you've seen the implosion of late night with Colbert and all these things. Where do you think they're going to go? Dude. They already have. They already have. They already have.

[00:46:57] Conan has a show on YouTube. He has three shows on YouTube actually. Conan show is way better now without all the rigmarole of the name. He's just sitting in a room with microphones. It's a radio show. Yeah. And he probably has a team of a, maybe a team of a dozen behind him, not 200. So, you know, the reality is they can make as much money. Is he, or maybe not? He's making more. He's making more because he's not reaching more people. A hundred percent. Um, also Trevor Noah, and this came up for a while ago.

[00:47:24] So at one point after, after the Rogan deal, a bunch of the podcast distributor type people, uh, wondering who is Amazon screwed up with that one. We won't get into that. It's gone. They all tried to go find some, you know, people to help them run these things. And even Apple and subscriptions, one of their first subscription was a Dave Chappelle subscription show in order to get, you know, subscriptions done on Apple podcasts.

[00:47:46] And what's absolutely insane is I look at the guys who left TV to go do their own stuff on YouTube and they are all absolutely crushing it. So when Steve got in trouble and then Jimmy, a couple of weeks later, I'm like, guys, don't sweat. Like you're, you're in like Flynn. And I know, I called, I called my friend that works on Kimmel's team. I was like, bro, if you need a hand, I will set you up. I'm not even going to charge you. I was like, I'm not even going to charge you just out of pure love. He already has millions of downloads on his videos on YouTube, right?

[00:48:15] 22 million subscribers on the channel. And that's more than watch the show. So, by far. I don't know how he structured the deal. Cause sometimes those channels like Colbert or whatever actually owned by CBS. Sometimes they're owned by that person's production company who is a part of the process. Yeah. But people, I gotta tell you, people don't watch the Colbert YouTube channel cause it's owned by CBS. They watch it for Colbert or Jimmy.

[00:48:44] So all you have to do is create your own and people will go to it. Yeah. 21.6 million. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to play it. 21.6 million subscribers. Yeah. He doesn't need ABC. Nope. You can make another one tomorrow. You know, he, one of my, one of my clients, um, you know, Ecamm users, they have a TV show on FanDuel network and part of prime video and it's called foul territory.

[00:49:11] And it's basically a bunch of ex MLB players that talk about the game today. And they are phenomenal. And I know what they caught, what they sort of spent to build their studio because well, it runs an Ecamm is not dissimilar from sort of what you do, but they have so many people watching this show because you're not just these weird pundits that never played the game. You got X ballers sitting here talking to you, telling you this kind of stuff. And you know, they can bring, because of their connections, they could bring in current players. They could bring in current managers.

[00:49:38] So I think it's really interesting that Conan did not try, you know, what right now is going on with Colbert and Kimmel and all the others is they're taking clips from a traditional tonight show set and just putting the little clip up. What I thought was really interesting that Conan did not attempt to recreate a tonight show. He is doing a radio show. They're just sitting in a room with microphones. Is there, is there a lesson from that? I mean, is it a hundred percent?

[00:50:08] It's like $10,000 worth of production costs, maybe a little more because he's using my techniques. It might, you know, the other techniques are a thousand a piece, but still it's okay. Yeah. It's a very nice radio studio, but it's a radio. It didn't, should, should, should Kimmel and Colbert and everybody else be thinking about that? Should they be thinking, let's not duplicate the TV show. Let's do something that's appropriate for YouTube. But is there even a thing that, is there even a book about what's appropriate for YouTube? It's whatever.

[00:50:38] It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's actually better if you dumb your production down because gurus have pissed off so many people lately that people aren't looking for gurus. People are looking for normal looking people who act like them, who seem like them. The only thing people want these days is authenticity and simple is authentic. Yeah. It could be, it could be Conan O'Brien driving a car with Kevin Hart.

[00:51:05] Remember, remember Jerry drove everybody around to get coffee? The aliens in cars with coffee. Dude, those are the best conversations. Those are some of the best interviews. Was that a TV show or was that a YouTube show? It was a Netflix show. It was a Netflix show. But it could have been a YouTube show. I mean really, what are the YouTube ethos? It was short. It was funny. Oh, and we just need to add one more touch point. Guess who is starting to do podcasts on their app? Netflix. Oh. There will be a Twitch channel on Netflix, bro.

[00:51:35] Wait a minute. They're putting us on Netflix? Well, you're gonna do it. Well, not you, Lisa. You ain't doing anything. What's this all about? Don't worry, Lisa. Lisa will tell you soon enough. Thank God, Lisa's gonna do it. Look, she, hey, look, I know my sister, she probably already got people on the phone. Hey, we need a slot. We need to be on this. Trust me, Lisa got a handle. You just keep doing what you do. You just show up and look cute, Leo.

[00:52:02] Yeah, Netflix is dropping podcasts because, again, like, Neil is right, Mohan. I act like I can call him by his first name. My buddy, Neil. They are crushing it. And he told everybody last year and everybody doubted it because they can't believe it. Last January, like 2025, the report was over a billion hours of podcasts served on TV. Not phone, not car, not Samsung refrigerator, just TV.

[00:52:31] Because when you're at home and you got a vacuum or clean the house or sort your CD collection. You just put it on this TV. I put Andy and Alex and Leo telling me that I do not need to buy a new Apple Vision Pro. Your open is fine. By the way, that's true. I felt some kind of way about this conversation. But I'm cleaning the house, right? Karen is like, dude, your area is starting to look a little effed up. Can you straighten it out? And I just put the boys on and I'm doing my stuff.

[00:53:00] You know, and Karen's like, why are you always watching your virtual friends? I was like, I actually know these guys. It's not my virtual friends. You actually literally know us. Yes. She's make fun of me because like I'll be yelling at y'all. I'll be saying that ain't right. You said that wrong. You should call in. I got to get a hotline. Little red phone here that say, wait a minute. Doc rocks on the line. What is it, Doc? You are wrong. That's a good idea. I want to make sure I point this out because it means so it means the world to me.

[00:53:27] About three or four years ago when my father-in-law got sick and mom's was just spending a lot of times in the house by herself. And, you know, she's watching TV and was nothing really on. And it just allowed her to fester because she couldn't keep her brain entertained. I told her to stop watching Food Network because she was overcooking because there's nobody in the house because dad was interesting. Right? So she was overcooking and just making stuff and then the amount of leftovers that we were getting. And she can cook. It's not bad food. Like she's Okinawa. She can cook. Yeah. But I was like, Mom, check this out.

[00:53:56] I bring up the YouTube button on the phone. I mean on the remote. I was like, here's on the Sony. Press the button that says YouTube. She goes, I don't watch YouTube. I was like, lady, just listen. And I take her to the channel and I showed her where all of the Okinawan programs are. Old movies, old music, things that, you know, remind her of home. Then I showed her all of the Japanese shows and then she's like, I found this really good Okinawan TV show on YouTube. She says, you tune with an N. And then she's watching all these videos.

[00:54:23] And then she's like, I was watching the Japanese show and your big head popped up on my screen. And she said, you were live streaming. And I was like, yeah. And now some of my students, like when they're making their videos, they talk to her. They say, hi, Baba. And she has conversations with my friends who are streaming because she thinks that they can, you know, hear her. And, you know, it's always funny to her that they call her out, but she watches YouTube religiously now because she's like, she can do it what she wants. Her interest craft, right?

[00:54:51] Is that long tail of Okinawa and, you know, Japanese cooking shows. And she's good. Should I be doing just now? This is has nothing to do. And I apologize to our audience who probably want to hear us talk about actual stories, but should I be doing anything differently, Doc? As far as what you're doing now? No, you're fine because you are putting out long content in the most important thing right now, because the world is getting sick of AI slop. And I want everyone to hear this. If you're thinking about it, you're being scared. This is your opportunity. The world is sick of AI slop.

[00:55:21] People are looking for real deal human connection. Just like Richard told you a little bit ago. People are looking for real people just doing real stuff. And if you make long content about whatever it is you're interested in and just show up in your most authentic self, you're going to be fine because that is what everybody is starving for right now. Yeah, 100%. That's why I think you're right. People sleep on Twitter. Actually, to be honest, that's what I said to myself 20 years ago when I was a refugee basically from TV.

[00:55:47] And we very early on decided to do live video, which at the time was a great expense and a lot more technically difficult. And nobody was doing it in podcasting. They were all audio. But for some reason, I have you down as as sort of like DJ Kool Herc where you were the reluctant pioneer. And most people who watch hip hop today have no idea who DJ Kool Herc was, but he basically started what we know is. Yeah, most people watch podcasts and YouTube don't know idea who I am.

[00:56:17] So yeah, and I'm like, you're seriously one of the OG pioneers. Tim, Tim Stewart told everybody at the podcast awards that you are, I saw Tim say it out loud and I'm like, yeah. Yeah, Tim Street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was in the room. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Like you were definitely one of the first. Yeah. So it was early on. He was the inventor of French Maid's TV, which was just probably it wouldn't fly today, but it was young women in French maid costumes.

[00:56:46] Not overly sexy, just regular French maid costumes, just explaining how things worked. It was an interesting concept. Tim's very. It was Benny Hill explanation. Yeah, it was Benny Hill explanations. I think this is a very interesting time we're in. Will people stop watching? What's the future hold for Netflix or network television even? I think Netflix is smart because they're figuring out things. They're bringing in games. They're bringing in podcasts. They're going to bring in live streams.

[00:57:16] Netflix is going to try to catch back up and they will be Pepsi. They will just stay second place and kick butt in second place. Which is not bad. The other players are losing their cookies because they're spending so much money. And, you know, there's I mean, this article points out that YouTube has spent more on content than Netflix and Paramount combined. $32 billion last year. Correct. Because they pay all of us. Yeah, they're not really spending money.

[00:57:44] Like they're not saying to a producer here, make a movie on this subject. They're just paying YouTube creators. They did try that though at one point. YouTube tried to. I know. I remember they didn't try that and it was a failure. In fact, I remember some big Hollywood guy coming to us saying, you know, you should get in on this. Didn't they put out like $100 million? You should get out on this. You know, $100 million are given away. And I said, eh. You know, the other thing that occurs to me is that YouTube's put the adpocalypse behind them now. You know, they fell apart a few years ago.

[00:58:14] That's a good point. When their top people were doing inappropriate things and scaring off advertisers. And that seems to have just gone by. Like, I think the world has gotten crazy enough that what used to be adpocalypse worthy is just Wednesday. People are also self-censoring themselves on YouTube now. So YouTube has a new play? Sorry, Benita? People are self-censoring themselves. That's why we get weird words like unalived in the hexagon. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. You get unalived. So, okay. So let me explain one more thing to you real quick.

[00:58:44] YouTube is doing a test right now that I know exactly where to do it. And it's funny because people are like so happy. So if you're watching the video on YouTube and then, sorry, Leo, Leo's about to do an ad read. Which I am. And if you're watching it later, you can press a button and skip over that ad. And yeah. Even my ad reads, they can do that? Yeah. Now, because what was happening is the AI is detecting where the ad reads are.

[00:59:36] Oh. And so I'm not going to do that. And I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. But I'm not going to do that. I know you don't. That's what's going to hit you though. That's what's going to hit you though. That's a crypto ad. It's a hidden ad. Yeah.

[01:00:06] And by the way, being it's also illegal under FTC rules, but I think it's also deceptive. Of course it works. Well, see in YouTube, you have to say that it's a sponsored video and you have to say that you're doing an integration. So if I were going to make an ad for Zojirushi, but my thing is a tutorial on how to cook 10 really cool one pot, dump everything in the pot, press the button meals using the Zojirushi. I'm going to say that this is a sponsored video, but the whole video is not an ad is teaching

[01:00:35] you how to use it. But then you'll see, man, I do need to get one of those. Cause just throw rice and salmon and press the button to walk away, add some pesto and stir it up. Oh, off the hook. By the way, try that out. Nice. But doc, you're talking about the arms race, right? When the ads stopped after the odd pop apocalypse, when abs stopped paying, these YouTubers tried to stay in business. So they started doing inline ads. They did their own sponsorship deals. They had to, to stay afloat. And now the software is able to detect them.

[01:01:03] So we're in the next stage of the arms race where YouTube is going to try and reassert themselves over that. This is one of my concerns is that YouTube, because it's so powerful, puts its thumb on the scale. And in fact, if it very much impacting the style of content, the way people create YouTube videos for that reason. And so it's why there's so much link bait in YouTube videos is why Mr. Beast is on top. And that's why I'm not saying that YouTube is on top.

[01:01:28] Because Mr. Beast's model works in this perverse incentive system that YouTube has created. And that's the biggest problem I have with YouTube, is it warps the content to fit its needs. To fit the algorithm. The algorithm chasing. Also like they change. It's not just the algorithm. It's also advertising. And they change that algorithm all the time. So like people are constantly trying to chase it. Right. Yeah, you can't chase it. And the new algorithm has nothing to do with popularity anymore.

[01:01:58] So even people like Mr. Beast are going to start to lose some money, which is why he's doing things with Amazon. He's other sort of prepaid situations. The algorithm works as follows. Now it's all based on interest. So if I told you what I just told you about the Zoujidushi and all of a sudden you went tomorrow and you looked at two videos about that. The next time you sit on your television and notice what you get asked to see on TV versus iPad versus iPhone completely different because it understands your viewing behavior. It's working like tick tock.

[01:02:28] It is an interest model, not necessarily a popularity game. I see channels every day with a person that has three subscribers and they just started out. But the video is about 3D printing and absorbing the heck out of that. It's in their interest to make new stars too, right? Because a hundred percent. Yeah. So people say, well, they smashed the small channels. That don't make any sense. They make money selling ads, bro. They're trying to get everybody to be on the platform as long as possible. So we make very little money.

[01:02:56] I should point out, we make very little money on YouTube and which is fine with me. Same here. Same here. But it's the gateway to, okay, like when we go to, you know, back in Petaluma and you took me to the restaurant, Helena's and you know, we have a good breakfast. Every time I'd say somebody they're going that way, I'm like, stop over there and eat. It's the Discovery Channel. It's not the, you know, your top performance. Yeah, that's why we did video. It was exactly why we did video in the first place. Yeah. All right.

[01:03:23] Got to take a break because of course, those of you watching in YouTube are going to see an ad for something completely different, but that's okay. Not yet. They haven't done it yet. They haven't done it yet. And you can press the skip button if you wish. That's all right. I don't, I don't, we don't have to hold you hostage. But if on the other hand, you see something on one of our advertisers and it's something you'd be interested in. I think that's, that's good for everybody. You know, it helps us. Of course the best thing to do.

[01:03:50] And I would, I wish, honestly, I wish we could survive this way is just to have the listeners pay for it. Right? I couldn't possibly use YouTube if I didn't have YouTube premium. The ads would just kill me. Right? And so YouTube makes plenty of money that way. I would love it if we could just be listener supported only. That's why we had club to it. And it's frankly, it's been very successful. I mean, I really appreciate all your club members. Thank you.

[01:04:17] And if we just get a few more, that would be the next, honestly, that would be the next stage. Cause that then YouTube wouldn't be able to, you wouldn't have to worry about skipping ads. Right? Is a club membership. Oh, well, uh, someday, someday that will happen. Uh, but for now we still love our advertisers. Very happy to affect this one is, is something I use every single day. It's, it's happier. You know about Zapier. I use Zapier to put our shows together.

[01:04:46] Uh, Zapier takes the tools that you use. Everything from Google docs to zoomed, whatever you use and connects them together to make workflows. I've been doing this for years. I've been using Zapier. So right now I have a bookmarking app raindrop that I, when I'm reading news stories, I bookmark it and raindrop. Zapier sees that there is a new item in raindrop. It automatically posts it to mast it on. We have a special account for twit news that goes there.

[01:05:16] And at the same time, it also moves in and it does it exactly as I ask it to and formats it and everything moves that story to a line in a Google docs spreadsheet, which then our producers use to create the rundowns for every show. So that's just a simple example of how Zapier is, is saving me hours of effort and clicks. And they do so much more now because they've added AI. We've been talking about AI like crazy.

[01:05:45] We would have a show on AI, but let's face it. And then talking about the AI trend doesn't help you particularly be more efficient at work. For that, you need tools. And that's why I love Zapier. Zapier is how you break that AI hype cycle and put AI to work across your company. What is Zapier? Zapier is how you actually deliver on your AI strategy. Not just talk about it. With Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow. So you can do more of what matters.

[01:06:15] For instance, I could connect a top model, chat, GBT, Claude, whatever. I think I probably use Claude for this. To that workflow I just described and Claude could synopsize the story that I bookmarked and put the synopsis in the spreadsheet or put it in a special rundown. Maybe create a briefing paper for our hosts. All of that automatically with Zapier. You connect the top AI models to the tools you're already using. You can add AI exactly where you need it.

[01:06:44] That could be an AI powered workflow, of course, but it also could be things like an autonomous agent, a customer chatbot. It could be what I'm doing, which is taking an existing workflow and adding a little AI at just the right spot to make it even more useful. You can orchestrate it, whatever it is, with Zapier. And Zapier doesn't require a PhD to use. It's for everyone. You don't have to be a tech expert. And the proof is in the fact that teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier.

[01:07:14] Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free. Visit Zapier.com slash twit. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash twit. Zapier.com slash twit. I'm telling you, you will find it amazingly useful. So, we thank Zapier so much for supporting this week in tech.

[01:07:40] Well, actually, as long as we're talking about the future of streaming, Doc, you wanted to talk a little bit about the future of F1 racing. So, Apple announced this in Austin last Saturday. They made a three quarters of a billion dollar deal with Liberty Media. Liberty Media, the big cable company. It's John Malone's company. It used to be cable. Now they've got their fingers in a lot of pies. But they own Formula One.

[01:08:08] And they sell the broadcasting rights. The broadcast rights in the US were ESPNs for the last few years. Apple came in with a big checkbook and stole it away, basically. So, starting next year, Formula One will be on Apple TV, not on ESPN. But more than that, and this was a sticking point. I think it's one of the reasons this took a long time.

[01:08:39] Apple asked Liberty, can you just stop that streaming app you got, the F1 TV? I pay $150 bucks a year to watch F1, not on ESPN, where I don't really want to watch it. Are you in a $10 plan or a $14? I guess $14 plan, never mind. Yeah, I'm on the high end. Because I have it on all my Apple TVs. I have it on my laptops. I have it everywhere in the house so I can watch. Plus, it's better than watching on TV because F1 TV, the streaming app, lets you see all the different drivers from their point of view.

[01:09:07] You can hear the driver radio for all the different teams. You have a data. You have amazing. I mean, there's so much telemetry. You have a map of the racetrack and where everybody is. There's a lot more information. And you can, I use a program for the Mac that lets me take all of those things and arrange them on the screen. So I can, on a big screen, I can really be immersed. I'm a little disappointed Apple's going to take that over. No, because we're going to get the Apple Vision Pro version, bro. I would, you know what? I would buy a Vision Pro. Move over, bro.

[01:09:36] I would buy a Vision Pro if they do that. Yo, because they, okay, one of the cool things, because Apple, you know, and their sensor game and their cameras, they design custom cameras to go into the wings. They design custom cameras to go into the halo and into the front valence. So we're going to have angles. And that's a big thing because you cannot slow these cars down with your little cameras. This is, this, this race is so close that it's literally matters of hundreds of a second.

[01:10:04] Bro, if the driver didn't take a dump before he started, he could come in fourth place. It's that time. Exactly right. The weight, in fact, this year, one of the drivers was disqualified because he weighed a few ounces too much. So this is a big, this is, you can't put these things on here willy nilly, but Apple's got the technology to do it. But see, that's the difference between Apple and ESPN because where ESPN screwed up is they never went to the Disney Imagineers and said, how do we make this even better?

[01:10:32] How do we make this more palatable to the United States audience? And the whole reason why Liberty even went to bed with ESPN post-noctum, prima noctum, I do callbacks. My bad, Richard. That was a callback we could have done without. Okay. But now everybody's going to look that one up. To try to get the U.S. audience to grow. Right.

[01:10:56] Which is the reason why NBC and the Premier League did that deal 10 years ago. Right. And NBC put the Premier League on, I'm a Manchester fan for years and NBC brought so many more of my friends to that game. And so I think Apple is the best position to do this because they could actually put tech behind it.

[01:11:18] And they could actually put some development and they could bring some things to the table that is more than just taking a prepackaged picture and putting it on the Internet. I hope so. That's why Apple is going to crush. And they made their $750 back in the movie, dude. They got $625 out of the movie. Oh, Apple can afford three quarters of a billion dollars. They got that change in the couch. That's easy. You know what I mean? Oh, it's going to be phenomenal. And they're absorbing the subscription. And so you take away the plus. Okay. Everybody got mad about it. I'm like, dude, it's a name.

[01:11:48] A rose by any other name still smells like Apple TV. Nobody ever called it Apple TV Plus. I never called it Apple TV Plus neither. Right. But now you're going to get the F1 subscription built in. They made the mistakes with MLS. They wrote those mistakes down and they learned from it. And now this next deal, I pretty much sure that they're going to knock it out of the freaking park. And I am looking forward to haptics in my phone when I'm watching on my phone and somebody hits a wall.

[01:12:15] And my phone goes, I'm going to be like, oh yeah, that was dope. You know, like, did you watch the trailer? The haptic trailer? For Formula One, the movie? F1, the movie? No. Oh, it's still on. It's still on.

[01:12:39] I didn't want to watch it in the theater and I'm waiting for it to come where I can just watch it at home because I have Bowers and Wilkins. So my theater sounds like the theater. Oh, it'll sound good. It'll sound really good. I didn't want to. I'm not paying 700 bucks for popcorn. My neighbor mixed it. So he works at Lucas. Oh, wow. Super cool. Yeah. Super cool. So I think they're going to crush this. And when I saw the story, I was like, Leo, because I know you and I both are like hardcore.

[01:13:08] And don't say anything about Mexico City. I was not able to watch the race today. And it's going to be a very important race today. So we don't want to. It makes you wonder if that movie had tanked, if they still would have done the steal. Good question. Probably not. It's a test case for them. Yeah. Well, it's a problem in America because most of the races happen in the middle of the night in the US time. So it must be worse for you. And you really need to watch them live. Well, you don't. And that's the test, right? Do you need to watch them live? I don't watch most of them live.

[01:13:38] Well, see, based off of the things that you could do in the F1 app now and based off of what Apple would be able to add to the table, then things like the Vision Pro or whatever, the cheap version of the Vision Pro eventually comes out and the new version of Apple TV would eventually come out. I would honestly, if they do put, if they do, there was a third party app, which Apple killed, or we think Apple killed for Formula One on the Vision Pro where you exactly, you were in the, like, it was amazing where you could see all the, it filled your vision with all the details and the stats and stuff. It's coming.

[01:14:08] You know, I think that's funny. I think that for NBA and for Premier League, MLS, all these games, you're going to be able to buy virtual Stubhubs, okay? So, in other words, if you want to be at Snapdragon and sit in 119.4 S section, I just know because that's where I sat for the Manchester game, I'm going to be able to buy that same seat again and be like, Bob, I remember I took you to the Premier League game in San Diego? And she's like, yeah. I was like, look, we can watch it now.

[01:14:38] So, put on this on your head and I'll put mine on. Will it be on U-Tune? No, it'll be on Apple TV. But you'll be able to pick. What does she call Apple TV? If you had an anniversary at a Patriots game or something and you want to relive that moment, you'll be able to buy a seat for a game. Or courtside at the NBA game. Yeah, there's just a virtual courtside, you know? And I know a bunch of people that, you know, the Apple didn't buy this to save the Vision Pro though, right? No, it's not just because of Vision Pro. They bought it because of Apple TV.

[01:15:07] Apple really looks like they're kind of losing interest in the Vision Pro. They've been crushing it on their content creation though. Like their shows, Severance. I mean, women, you know? Yeah, Apple TV's doing just fine. What was the Lily Gladstone? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, crushed it. Absolutely crushed it with that. Morning Show and Ted Lasso, of course. So, yeah, these guys, they're starting to get to a point where they're making some of these other... Slow Horses wraps up this weekend. Slow Horses.

[01:15:37] Oh, my God. Hercules, Hercules. Favorite show. Yeah. I'm going to push back on the AR view off the halo though because we are not F1 drivers and that is too fast. You will throw up. You will be sick. And you will be frightened. Those are not normal humans. No, that's true. They're not. There's 20 of those people in the world. Skinny guys with a neck like this. Yeah, because they pull three Gs in the turns. It's crazy. That takes a lot of muscle power. It's crazy. I pull three Gs and I'm falling down the steps.

[01:16:07] Do you remember that clip of that driver going around the stall driver in the tunnel? It was played everywhere. And it's literally a fraction of a second. He comes around the corner. There's a car stopped. And he goes around him. This is not normal. Those are weird humans. I would... That's why I enjoy it. I'd watch that clip from a first-person view once or twice. Then I'd throw up. Probably watch it again. But those reactions are unbelievable. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. It's cool.

[01:16:37] I just think it's something about that thing. And I'm watching Monster now, right? On Netflix. And they're going into the Ed Gein story, right? And I won't get into it because it's heavily morbid. But when Albert Hitchcock brought the novel cycle to the television, his whole thought process was up until what had happened in World War II, we always had all of the monsters on TV were fictional.

[01:17:06] Frankenstein, Dracula, Creature from the Black Lagoon, you know, werewolf, whatever. The Ed Gein story was the first time that human heinousness was actually told out to the world. Normally, those stories was hidden. And if you go back into history, you realize we had a bunch of, like, civic leaders who were that crazy, too. But you just didn't hear about it because they were rich and those stories got buried and Silver Sun, etc.

[01:17:33] But he changed the way we have a relationship because he says the thing about Hitchcock was he says no matter how messed up this is, you're the problem because you can't take your eyes off of it. Huh. He was a sick mofo, by the way. He was really a sicko. No, he was too. I loved his movies, but he was not a normal. Huge fan. But his whole point was it's the reason why when you're driving, everyone says, how come everybody stops and stares at the accident? Right. And you say that you don't do it.

[01:18:03] But fam, if I'm recording you on the dash cam, I guarantee you every time you drive past one of them, you bitched about the traffic. And when you get there, you're like. We have to. We're rubberneckers. We can't help it. Right. Actually, we have a problem here in Petaluma because there's a corn maze right on the highway. And it is always slow going through the corn maze. It's like, dude, it's there every October. You haven't. Why are you slowing down? It didn't sneak up on you.

[01:18:31] Now, that would be scary if the corn maze snuck up on us. We had a good time, by the way, on Friday in our corn maze with Micah Sargent, our D&D, a dungeon master. He led us through a corn maze. That was so much fun. Paul will probably talk about it on Wednesday on Windows Weekly, Richard. But Paul Therot. I know you wanted to go, but you couldn't because you were traveling. We had Jacob Ward, Paris Martineau, and Jonathan Bennett from the Untitled Linux Show. And we were adventurers in a corn maze. It was a lot of fun.

[01:19:00] If you're a member of Club Twit, it's on the Twit Plus feed. You can watch it. Let's take a little break. Come back with more. I would have thought after that corn maze adventure that I would have a hard time sleeping. But in fact, I was just looking at my sleep score. You know, the little sleep app I use, the Oura Ring, gives you a crown when you have a really good sleep score. I got a crown. I got a crown last night. And I'm going to give credit to our sponsor, Helix Sleep.

[01:19:28] I love my Helix Sleep mattress. In the Northern Hemisphere, we're getting ready for the cool season. I guess, Darren, down in the Southern Hemisphere, you're getting ready for the hot season. Now, those of us in the North are going to spend more time indoors, which means probably more time on our Helix mattress. You know, watching, you know, spooky shows on TV, cuddling up with a kitty. I know we do that. We love to do that. Reading a good book.

[01:19:56] Helix is the mattress of my dreams. It changes everything. No more night sweats. No back pain. No motion transfer. I used to pop straight up when the cat jumped on the bed because I thought we were having an earthquake. Earthquake! And no, it was just the kitty cat. Actually, it's funny because we did have an earthquake a few weeks ago. In the Bay Area. And the Helix mattress just kind of kept me calm and cool. I didn't jump out of bed.

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[01:21:12] In a Wesper sleep study, Helix measured the sleep performance of participants after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. Look what they found. 82% of participants switching from their old mattress to the Helix saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. I did. In fact, participants on average achieved 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. Let me just check. I'll tell you right now. Last night, how much deep sleep did I get? I got 6% more, 34%.

[01:21:41] My REM was an hour and 47 minutes. Wow. Oh, I just slept like a dream. 85 sleep score. Thank you, Helix. Thank you. And that's what they found in this study. In fact, participants on average achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. Imagine what your life would be like if you had a great night's sleep every night, if you felt great every morning. I don't have to imagine. Time and time again, Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand.

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[01:23:06] There's always great deals there. Back to the news. Hacker news. Foreign hackers, we found out, breached a U.S. nuclear weapons plan. And guess how they did it? SharePoint. On-prem SharePoint at that, which is your excuse for. Yep. It's the 20, what is it, the 2019 version of SharePoint? Probably. Has a flaw in it.

[01:23:35] This is about the last place you'd want bad guys to be. The Kansas City National Security Campus, a key manufacturing site within the National Security Nuclear Security Administration. Why were they running unpatched SharePoint on-prem? Well, and it was a recent exploit. It's only a month or two old. Right. You know, we've been talking about this on Run As Radio. It's like the exploits are so serious. The risk of being down for a bad patch is lower than the risk of not patching.

[01:24:04] And so, you know, even if these guys are diligent, they're probably still testing the patch. Right. But then what they should have done is just deployed it and dealt with the problem that somehow it broke. This was fixed in July, though, right? I mean, it's not like. That's still pretty recent for your typical workflow. Yeah. You know, and if you're still doing it the old-fashioned way, these days it's more of a mindset of get the patch in, deal with possible problems with the patch. Actually, as I look at this article, they were breached the day before the patch. Right. So it was out there.

[01:24:34] So it wasn't even their fault. Yeah. Fortunately. Other than why you're running on-prem SharePoint. You know, it was patched SharePoint Online. Right. Well, they say the department, this is the Department of Energy saying the department was minimally impacted due to its widespread use of the cloud. Right. And very capable cybersecurity systems. Only a small number of systems were impacted. So that's good news. 80% of the non-nuclear parts in our nuclear stockpile come from that campus.

[01:25:03] So it could have been pretty bad. Here's just a tip, a warning. Don't use a browser from China called the Universe Browser. Okay. They claim perfect privacy's protection. That should be a giveaway. The Nigerian prince compels you. Yes. The Universe Browser is created for all of you, it says.

[01:25:34] It's equipped with the virtual technology of cloud, it says. Oh. This is an easy operating and high efficiency browser and is also your personal computer. Don't do it. Don't do it. It phones home. It links to online gambling websites in China. It is sad to say, but they think it's been downloaded millions of time. All internet traffic is routed through servers in China. Covertly install several programs that run silently in the background.

[01:26:04] Key logging, that kind of thing. Boy. Oh. So, you know, maybe don't install the Universe Browser. Just, you know, it's a public service announcement. I saw this video, Leo, the other day, and it was Kung Law, and she was going around talking to people who had actually got phone calls and put their money into these Bitcoin ATMs. Oh, yeah. I saw that story.

[01:26:33] Oh, my God. You got to ask yourself, how? How? The dude was like, yo, I put in like 11 grand or something. And so what these people were doing were going in, and the law enforcement were like taking a sawzall and cutting the machine open and trying to get these people's money out. Well, the company that makes the machines are suing the cops for cutting open the machines. It's not our fault, man. We're not the scammer. We're not the scammer, but once it goes in there, we need our cut. You know? And I was like, bro, this story is crazy.

[01:27:02] And you have to wonder, like, how many people have this happened? And so as a public service announcement, this is something that we talked about in my family because trust me, my mother-in-law gets these calls, and she is English as a second language. And I go, if anybody calls you, it even remotely starts talking about money, switch to Japanese, never say another word, and tell them to call, you know, one of us. And then I said, none of us are going to call you and ask you for money because we got access

[01:27:30] to the accounts anyway, but, you know, we have a code word. And she did mention in that thing from a cyber expert was like, make sure you tell people in your family, if Richard's going to call and ask you for money, there's a secret code word that everybody in the family knows. So, you know, it's not a fake because of course you can do AI voice now. So anybody can call Baba and sound like me. And even more so, you could probably do it with my same Japanese accent, which is a little

[01:27:57] funny because I kind of, my Japanese is kind of Yakuza, but with an American twitch to it. Wait a minute, isn't Yakuza the mob, the mafia? Yeah, but I spend a lot of time in Osaka and if depending on where you are in Osaka, you're going to be Kansai-bin. So I speak more Kansai-bin than traditional Japanese and you'll pick, you'll pick it up anyway. It's just like, you know, people in New York have fugazi. Not everybody's Italian, but they say so. But they all forget about it. Yeah. You know, we have these one words that were words, but there are eight words, but there are one word in New York, right? You just have those.

[01:28:26] So there's certain colloquialisms that come up. But yeah, I just think that's an important story that everybody should watch, even though you're probably, as a tech nerd, most of us, we're going to sit there and go like, how could you fall for that? But trust, as a person who has two members in their family that, you know, have dealt with dementia or one that's now left us because of it, anybody could be of that age where you might believe this kind of stuff. So it was a crazy story. It's very, you know, and when you see that, you know, like the browser, like how could that many people download it?

[01:28:55] Well, that's easy for us to say as nerds, but there's a bunch of people that would download it that, you know, in your family. Just remember that the son of Quack Quack Gambino uses iCloud, and that's what got him in trouble. The Justice Department, you may have read this story, arrested a bunch of mobsters for a fraudulent poker game. They had hacked the car shufflers, which is kind of brilliant.

[01:29:25] The FBI played up the fact that NBA, an NBA star was involved in it and a Portland Trailblazers coach was involved. That really isn't a big part of the story. They were both kind of shills for it. You know, they did ads for it. It was really a mafia hack, and it was iCloud backups that helped the NBA catch them. I'm glad they use iCloud.

[01:29:55] I recommend it, but don't assume that you are safe. Federal investigators used photos and data stored in iCloud accounts to uncover the multi-state poker rigging scheme. The group relied on modified shuffling machines and subtle signals to manipulate high stakes games across state lines. The iCloud data included imagery of key evidence, such as an x-ray table used to rig poker games.

[01:30:23] Several deckmate shufflers disassembled to show their circuit boards in a computer program that tracked information from the altered machines. You know, I respect the Quack Quack and others for their good backup hygiene, but maybe don't assume that your stuff is absolutely safe. If you're a criminal, you should back up locally. Yeah. Still back up. Or encrypt, right? And don't use AWS East. Yeah.

[01:30:51] Spanish G, Luap, Flapper and Flappy, Quack Quack Juice, Black Tony Sugar, Albanian Bruce, Scrooley and Stanley. I wonder where Bruce is from. Osman Hoti, also known as Albanian Bruce or Big Bruce. Big Bruce. Also, John South, Kurt, Doc, Black Rob, Pookie and Jay. And what I got to do with this, wait, how did I get in there? No, it was the other Doc.

[01:31:21] The other Doc. I was saying, like, I could do Doc Rivers. I'm a Celtics fan, but come on. That's pretty funny. That's crazy. That's pretty funny. I did mention that to my friends. I was like, one of the reasons why everybody went ham on the NBA guys is because instead of looking at these criminals over here, let's go pick at something that would really make people mad. The idea of basketball people cheating on basketball or any other sport person cheating in sport is more crazy to most Americans. You expect the wise guys to do it, right?

[01:31:50] It's more crazy to most Americans than some politicians hiding a list that they should publish. So let's change the look from there over to the sports guys because everybody cares about that. It's a hotter headline. Yeah. And it was better for the FBI. Those guys don't know any better. They don't know nothing. They were doing ads for it. They were the front for it. They probably didn't know what they were getting involved in.

[01:32:14] Here's one of the images taken from the iCloud account of a Deckmate 2 disassembled Deckmate 2 shuffler. That's pretty... Watch the video from Wired on how it works and oh, it is freaking incredible. It's pretty sharp. Yeah. Clever. If you go on YouTube and look at Wired and Deckmate and it's only like maybe a week old, that video is really incredible. And the guy's dealing the hands after he's programming it in with the PC, like what he wants to come out. It is crazy. Wow.

[01:32:43] Absolutely crazy how well it works. Wow. There was a camera in there. So there's a camera in the Deckmate. And so as it's shuffling, the camera records the order of the deck and then they somehow communicate that to the player. So they actually know what the other people's hands are. Yeah. They get taps on their wrists like a nausea watch. Right? Oh, Leo has a full house. And that's pretty amazing.

[01:33:11] So they had the Wired guy, an unskilled poker player who's the Wired guy, beat like really good poker players. Well, yeah, of course you're going to beat him if you know what their hands are. Yeah. So he was like, how did you bluff me with a pair of jacks? And the poker player guy got pissed because this dork beat him in the game. And that guy just looked like a net beard from Portland. And he smoked this guy. And that other guy got legit mad. So they had to confess because he couldn't understand how this did.

[01:33:39] So they weren't necessarily telling him what the cards were. They were telling him when to bet, when to raise, when to fold. Yes. That's what it was. Because that's easier. Raise, fold, call, bet. Yeah. Much simpler. Wow. Yeah. This is a good video on the Wired YouTube channel. And if you know where to buy that watch, I'm going to Vegas next month. Somebody has to give me an affiliate link. You might get uninvited to the community. I will cut you in. But really, it's not Vegas that lost.

[01:34:08] I guess they lost a little bit. It was the private rooms. Yeah. Everybody's doing the private rooms. Yeah. And then they're doing like, you know, like leg tappers or like feet tappers, you know, things that are much more easy. I don't think they're as high tech as to figure out how to do it in a watch yet. But that would even be more smart because, you know, no one's expecting the watch. Right. They might get patted down and they might feel your leg thumper. So it's a few years after the COVID pandemic. But Financial Times has this story.

[01:34:38] Rubbish IT systems cost the U.S. at least $40 billion during COVID. And you can blame COBOL. You can blame COBOL for that. COVID put a lot of... This story sent me to my core. Sure. This is a working paper from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Board. States that used antiquated unemployment insurance benefit systems experienced a 2.8% decline

[01:35:08] in total credit and debit card consumption. Because they used... The systems are done in COBOL. Real GDP cost of $40 billion 2019 dollars. When I was in school in 99, Mrs. Susan Lai, my teacher, she made us do COBOL.

[01:35:31] And all I wanted to know was PHP and C because I wanted to know how to write Apple apps and web apps. And she forced us to read... This is the companion, this big obnoxious book. And she forced us to learn COBOL because she's like, the Hawaii banks and the Hawaii state systems need you guys to go in and save them from the Y2K.

[01:35:53] And so we had to sit through multiple, multiple classes chasing that freaking period at the end of the line, which would break the whole code. So you could write 3,000 lines of code and you forget one period and it wasn't... There's no easy grip and replace. You can't find the missing period. So you had to stare at all the code to try to find the broken period. I hate this language so much. Oh, wow. You still have it. The Wiley COBOL syntax reference guide.

[01:36:22] When I saw the story, bro, it shook me to my core. I can't believe you didn't have that. Because it brought me back to college. Like, I wasted so much money on weed because I had to study this crap. Rich, did you ever have to learn COBOL? No, I mean, I learned it in passing, but I never made any money from it. It was very English-like, right? That was the whole idea. It was... Yes. Yeah. It was... That's always a bad idea in programming language. It was a procedural batch language, right? Yeah. It was good for the time, but... Worse than Fortran? Different than Fortran? Yeah, Fortran was more practical.

[01:36:52] They still... Well, to be clear, at least in the .NET world, both Fortran and Fujitsu COBOL are maintained as .NET languages. So they're still out there. Oh, there's tons of banks that are still using... You got to migrate off this stuff. Yes. Oh, my God. It was so crazy. And you find out, like, whenever a major system goes down here, the problem is there's a shortage of COBOL coders. Yeah.

[01:37:15] And so they came to University of Hawaii and said, I know all your IT guys want to learn web programming and app development and gaming and whatever, but we need you to teach them COBOL. And my teacher bit the bullet. I wonder if they took her out to dinner and styled her out because she made every single freaking one of us in the IT program get good at COBOL. Wow. And it was a language that's terrible. They should have touched a common list. It would have had something of, you know, useful. Bro. Or force. Man.

[01:37:42] I was trying to learn Dreamweaver back then. You remember? Dreamweaver? Wow. I was like, I signed up for the Dreamweaver class. Oh, we're canceling that because not enough people signed up. So they gave you COBOL? Yes. They were forcing us all to do COBOL. That's wild. Because they needed us to fix the way. And this COBOL developers are aging out, right? Yeah. Yeah. We brought them out of retirement in 1999. Yeah. Correct. 25 years ago. But if they were retired 25 years ago. Yeah.

[01:38:12] They're in their late 80s. They're seriously retired now. Us were in their 60s and 99. Yeah. Right? The dudes that came in to, like, give us the pep talk were in their 60s and 99. And here I am, like, young, stoned. I ain't got time for this mess. What are we doing? Wow. This is on the banks at this point. I mean, IBM still makes the Z-Series. Like, you can buy a machine, a modern computer that will run COBOL. Well, I'm sure.

[01:38:38] I mean, do we know how much of the nation's infrastructure and financial services are still running COBOL? I mean, like, traffic lights and, you know, the water sewers, like, gate management systems for overweight, stuff like that. Yo, those are all the old systems, bro. It works. Got to. Well, it does it? Because it wouldn't mean the news if it worked. Yo, and then you had to, like, you couldn't just do it on your computer and upload the code. You had to do it on the VAX. Like, we had that gigantic IBM VAX.

[01:39:08] We had to work on the VAX. I'm like, bro. So, we're going to take you from the 1960s back to 2025 and Counter-Strike. Now, we've all played Counter-Strike, right? I mean, it's, wasn't it originally a Halo user hack? Half-Life. Or Half-Life. That's right.

[01:39:30] It was a Half-Life user hack, which became probably one of the most popular multiplayer games out there. Apparently, now, Benito has a very good theory on this, but apparently, Counter-Strike outfits and weapons, there's a very big thriving marketplace valued literally at billions of dollars in these.

[01:40:00] Cosmetics, they call them. You can buy keys to loot boxes, but you can also buy the contents of loot boxes. Knives and gloves, apparently, were very valuable. For instance, the Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife could fetch as much as $20,000 in real money, I might add, on third-party storefronts.

[01:40:26] Well, a couple of days ago, October 22nd, Valve updated Counter-Strike and changed just a subtle, subtle little thing. The second highest tier, Covert, can now be traded up and turned into the highest tier, Knives and Gloves. I don't understand what I'm talking about, so if you want to correct me, anybody, go ahead. I've got the hotline open to you, Doc.

[01:40:57] But what basically happened is billions of dollars in market value, $1.75 billion was lost, in effect, overnight. The Butterfly Knife, now going for $12,000 because people are dumping them. Well, they're dumping them because they're not really worth that much. You could trade up to them now instead of them being impossible to get.

[01:41:24] You get a bunch of the stealth knives, combine them to make a Covert knife. That's the concept. Right. Right. Right. So there are people, sellers in the Counter-Strike third-party market who are saying, I've lost millions. Millions. From electrons. Well, and Valve, completely reasonable update. Do you think Valve knew what they were doing?

[01:41:53] So Benito has a theory. He says this is like the high-end art market, that people are actually using this to launder money. Yeah. Deal-gotten gains. 100%. Cryptocurrency and so forth. So it's not so much the Butterfly Knife, the Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife as a way of turning your money into something real. Like really any unregulated marketplace turns into that eventually. Yeah, right.

[01:42:21] Before Counter-Strike, it was World of Warcraft. There were people that were like training their characters and selling them for $4,000 or $5,000. And so you could go into these weird browsers and buy an elevated Orc or something. I'm frowning about Warcraft. But one of my friends, he was like selling characters and skins and stuff. And it got nefarious. And so he stopped doing it. Yeah. But the money laundering side is from any country, from any form of currency, you can buy into this market.

[01:42:50] And then sell them again in a more controlled market like U.S. dollars. So it's just a way to transport money across borders. Right. Well, which makes me think maybe Valve knew that and wanted to kind of eliminate that as something. I mean, it hasn't really. That exchange difference isn't going to matter to a launderer. That's a good point because it's not real money. They're willing to take 10 cents on the dollar, right? They don't care. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:43:20] Yeah. I don't think Valve really cared because this, to them, this actually makes them money. Like this secondary market. Well, do they get a cut of this? No. They don't get a cut of this, but they get a cut of people buying the original loot boxes and stuff like that. Right. Where they can, now they can combine a bunch of the obtainable things to get the unobtainable. Right. Yeah. I didn't realize it was still that big. I thought we all migrated to Call of Duty. When Call of Duty came out, I left Counter-Strike.

[01:43:46] But I feel like, you know, the whole idea of buying color-coded, you know, ASDWs and all of that all came back from the Counter-Strike days. Yeah. It was the first. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. I'm sorry if you have a lot of money invested in Counter-Strike cosmetics. That's crazy. I apologize. That's a good name for a company you could be a supporter. Yeah. So, Counter-Strike cosmetics. Maybe I should start a YouTube channel selling Counter-Strike cosmetics for manly men.

[01:44:16] That's crazy. You know, just dab a little bit on your nose to reduce the shine and the girls will go crazy. GM has had a big event this week and announced a bunch of interesting modifications, including what they say will be an eyes-off, hands-off self-driving system. Not next year or the year after, but in 2028. Starting with the Cadillac Escalade IQ.

[01:44:45] This was at the GM Forward event on Wednesday in New York City. Super Cruise. This is a foundation that's featured. Super Cruise, which is actually, I've driven Super Cruise in a Cadillac and it's really good. And does a lot of things. One of the things Super Cruise did, Sam and Bull Sam had talked, took me out in his review unit, is if you, if it can't see your eyes, it starts shaking the wheel. It starts annoying you saying, look, look, you're not watching the road.

[01:45:15] So, and by the way, this is difficult to do at highway speeds. I actually covered my eyes, but I peeked. But the camera in the steering wheel thought I had stopped paying attention and let me know. Well, soon you won't have to pay attention. One of the things GM does do is it made sure that Super Cruise was on mapped highways, not on city streets and so forth. Unlike, for instance, Tesla's full self-driving. I sent a tweet out.

[01:45:44] The other one was, it was a threads and an Instagram post. Because I was driving, I was going to Waikiki, and this person in the Tesla kept coming into my lane. And I sent a tweet, I was like, yo, dear Tesla driver, how about you let the car drive? Because you're obviously not that good at it. I stopped using Tesla. This person kept weaving into my lane. I'm like, get out of here. Tesla can be kind of aggressive. I think that probably was a human driving. And that's actually really the real point of this is, however bad it gets with self-driving vehicles, they get a lot more attention when they get in accidents.

[01:46:14] It's still much better than humans. 100% because this person was terrible. I don't know what the heck they were doing. And I was like, yo, let the car drive. I feel safer because you kept working into my lane and whatnot. And every time I get a rented car that has it, I check out each different brands, like who's getting better. And I have to say, I just had a Volkswagen Atlas. That's a big, you know, humangous Volkswagen. That thing was good. That thing was amazing at driving. So Tesla's full self-driving.

[01:46:44] I don't have a Tesla anymore. I had a Model X for a long time and enjoyed it. Why'd you give it up, Leo? The lease ran out. And my wife said, it's Christine and it's trying to kill me. And so you need to get rid of it. But she swore that it would veer into highway dividers or at least try to. So she had to grab the wheel. There was a curve that we go by frequently on Highway 101 that seemed to confuse it. It always gets wrong. Yeah.

[01:47:10] It also had gull-wing doors, which were supposed to have sensors in the tips of them. So it wouldn't hit people in the head. Apparently didn't. Because every time I closed the doors, it would hit Lisa. Yeah. So tell Lisa that Katie just reviewed Christine, the movie on her podcast. So it's really funny that she made that reference. She called the car Christine. The killer car in the Stephen King. Such a good movie. John Carpenter. John Carpenter. John Carpenter. That's right.

[01:47:40] But was it not a Stephen King? It was a Stephen King story. Stephen King story. And the Carpenter made the movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the fog. Anyway, Tesla, modern Tesla's full self-driving have different settings. There's one called Sloth. Elon always likes these names. Which relaxes acceleration and stays in its lane. So you should have told your neighbor driver, use Sloth. But there's another one, which I don't recommend, called Mad Max. Mad Max. Why?

[01:48:09] Why do this? Why do this, Elon? Why Mad Max speeds and swerves through traffic to get you to your destination faster? Man. Now the National Highway Transportation, or sorry, Traffic Safety Administration wants to know a little bit more about Mad Max mode. It's the mode where you get to climb on the hood with a flaming guitar. The one that has the chainsaw coming out.

[01:48:37] That's the one that makes the chainsaw come out. Yes. Yeah. That's crazy. Dozens of complaints of Tesla EVs running stop signs. I remember this, because Elon didn't like to stop at stop signs. They would do rolling, what we call California stops at the stop signs. Or crossing into oncoming traffic while operating under full self-driving. According to Reuters, NHTSA is now seeking more information from Tesla about Mad Max mode.

[01:49:07] They should have patches you can download. So you can download like New York taxi driver when you got to get to the airport. Yeah. I think, you know, I used to have in the Model X, see, at the time I thought, oh, Elon's doing good for the world. He's changing the world. I really want to support him. So I bought things like the biohazard protection mode, which even had a biohazard logo on the button. It was an on-screen button.

[01:49:35] And all it was was a HEPA filter in the, but he called it bio weapon. And so that was cool. And I bought it because I thought, oh, that's cool. And I want to support what Elon's up to. It's back when we still thought Elon was quirky. Yeah, just quirky. That's all. Just a little quirky. A little quirky. I was just having flashbacks of two weeks ago when I was in Mass. They should have the Sumner tunnel mode where your car just basically stops and move three feet every 10 minutes.

[01:50:05] Oh, God. Yeah, Southern Cal. Raining on the highway, Southern Cal mode. Everybody stop. That's the same in Hawaii. And yet it rains here every day, but nobody knows how to drive in the rain. I fly to Boston's Logan Airport to visit. When I go out to visit my mom and my sister in Providence, I fly into Logan. And last time I flew in, I got in late at night. It was a delayed flight because of big storms on the East Coast. And, of course, that's when they fix the tunnels in the big dig. Right.

[01:50:32] So I had a very round, a very circuitous route to get from the airport to Providence. I mean, it was crazy. I'm surprised you're not flying into TF Green, man. That's an easy airport to get in. You know, I did once. I thought, oh, this is going to be great. I'll fly right to Providence. Yeah. The problem is I had to fly to Baltimore to get to Providence. There's no direct flights from San Francisco. And so when you're going that way, that's the same route that I would take to get to Amesbury because Providence is only like another 20 miles past Amesbury.

[01:51:01] I wish there were a direct flight to Providence, but there isn't. And there was a, why did you fly into Manchester? Because that drive back on Manchester and the skinny street is... Logan is only half, 45 minutes to an hour away from Providence. It's easy. If you don't get in at midnight. Unless the traffic's tanked and then it's three hours. Yeah. Yeah. Automatic is back at it suing WP Engine over trademark violations. I love Matt Mullenweg.

[01:51:30] I think he's a little bit, this is a hot button for him. How long has this been going on? God, it seems like it's forever. It's like the Apple and Samsung one back in the very beginning. Yeah. It was like nine years of just craziness. So WP Engine sued Automatic, but Automatic is countersuing. Now they say that the problem is that the big private equity firm, Silver Lake, which bought WP Engine in effect.

[01:52:00] It was also in the electronic arts deal too, right? Yeah. Silver Lake's a big one. Automatic says that following the quarter of a billion dollar investment from Silver Lake, the WP Engine sought to quote, sought to inflate its valuation and engineer a quick lucrative exit. That's what private equity often does. That's what happened to Red Lobster and other famous private equity investments.

[01:52:25] It did that by describing itself, according to the countersuit, as quote, the WordPress technology company. I can see how that might annoy WordPress a little bit and allowed its partners to refer to it as WordPress engine. The true name is WP Engine to avoid stomping on WordPress's trademark. Automatic claims products, WP Engine released like quote, core WordPress and quote, headless

[01:52:53] WordPress further obfuscated the company's role. And WP Engine did not follow through on its commitment to help with the development of WordPress. WordPress is an open source project. And typically when you make a lot of money on an open source project, it's kind of considered proper to contribute back to the project. Even if it's just money, right? Even if it's just money. Yeah. And we did a show recently talking about a company was heavily using an open source project, didn't have the people for it.

[01:53:22] So they offered bounties on issues that they cared about. That's a good way to do it. Yeah. Like just kick the cash in to get the code written to move the project forward. Yeah. In fact, Automatic says Silver Lake actually approached Automatic to buy WP Engine at a $2 billion valuation. So maybe there's more to this story. Yeah. This could all be tactics to try and roll it up. Yeah.

[01:53:51] Well, and we've seen private equity do that time and time again. So you can take our $2 billion now or we can slowly take it out of you in legal fees, which would you like? Right. Right. It's still extortion. Here's another interesting bad actor, the venture capital fund A16Z. They backed a startup that sells synthetic influencers. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And Dreesen Horowitz is funding a company. This is from 404 Media. They do good work.

[01:54:19] It's funding a company that clearly violates the inauthentic behavior policies of every major social media platform. It's AI astroturfing. Yeah. The startup, it's called Double Speed, pitches an astroturfing AI-powered bot service. Quote, this is in the pitch. This is on the Double Speed site. They're excited about it. They're excited about it.

[01:54:46] Our deployment layer mimics natural user interaction on physical devices to get our content to appear human to the algorithms. Okay. It uses AI to generate social media accounts and posts with a human doing a little bit 5% of touch-up work at the end of the process. Okay. Well. We get the AI to lie for you, so you don't have to. Yeah.

[01:55:14] Our system analyzes what works to make the content smarter over time. The best performing content becomes the training data for what comes next. Double Speed also says its service can create slightly different variations of the same video, saying, quote, one video, 100 ways. Winners get cloned, not repeated. And 404 actually has pictures of this. This is not a real person. This is an AI-generated influencer. It looks kind of uncanny.

[01:55:43] Does it? Could you tell? Do you think you could tell, Doc? Well, I'm looking at it big on my screen right now, and I'm like, this one's... Well, I'm not seeing it move. And still, it's hard to tell. But if you see it move, sometimes it's easier because the eyes just always look... And people are getting real sensitive, too. Well, I hope so. In the Valley, yeah. Don't watch it. But I also think it's going to be harder and harder to see it, right? I mean, look how far we've come in just a few years. Yeah. These are all fakes.

[01:56:16] Fake. Yeah. A Reddit spokesperson told 404 that it would violate their terms of service. No response from TikTok, Meta, and X, but I think probably they would say the same. But now that it's funded by Andreessen, it must be good, right? Yeah. They raised a million dollars from A16Z in their accelerator program. That's surprising. That's very little money from A16Z. Well, it's kind of seed capital, right?

[01:56:43] This is their speedrun accelerator, a fast-paced 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth. Yeah. But you know there's companies like this. Advance your criminal organization. It's what can be possible. That's the point, though. It's not criminal, is it? It's just a violation of terms of service, but it's not. You're never going to jail for it. I wish. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah, this is like you just financed AI slop. Excellent. Exactly.

[01:57:12] It's a breach of the social contract, really. It's a breach of the social contract. It's what it is. But look, I think what happens when you have kind of mass violation of the norms, which is going on in the United States right now by people in power, it empowers other people to do the same. It's like, oh, it's okay. Game on now. Norms, who cares? It's not against the law. I'm going to do it. It's okay. Remember, greed is good? Right.

[01:57:42] Yeah. Gordon Gekko. Gordon Gekko. Lawful evil. Michael Douglas. In D&D speak, it's lawful evil. There you go. Yeah. Lawful, but it's still evil. All right. Let's take a little break. Then I'm going to talk about nuclear reactors with you, Richard Campbell, because natrium. Do you call it natrium or natrium? Natrium. Natrium. These are sodium. Natrium. Sodium. The N-A is sodium, right? Sodium-based nuclear reactor salt. We'll talk about that in just a second.

[01:58:12] But first, a word from our sponsor. We're so glad to have you, Richard Campbell. Normally, you'll see him every Wednesday on Windows Weekly. All these are true. He also does run his radio, not at rocks. And you'll find him all at runusradio.com. There you go. I got it in. Thank you, Richard. And he is a very popular public speaker traveling the world to talk about all sorts of interesting things. Doc Rock. You'll find him on YouTube at Doc Rock. YouTube.com.

[01:58:41] And he's director of strategic partnerships at Ecamm. And he lives in the purple. Oh, you don't have a purple muff anymore. You have an orange muff. I switched to pink because October. Oh, for October. Yeah. I mean, I make them so I have all of the colors. They're back there. How is that business going, by the way? It's good. I had to ship all of them home because of the dang tariffs. And so now, instead of having them shipped directly from my factory in Hong Kong, I had to bring them home.

[01:59:10] So I have 4,000 of them on the other side of that wall. Kind of obnoxious. It smells like foam. You have 4,000 Doc Pops in your house? Yeah. So how did you avoid the tariffs on them? They're made in Australia. Because I got it home. I got it home in time. Okay. And I literally had to pay crazy amounts to fly them home because I had to beat the date. And so I got them in like two days. And they said, oh, we're going to punt it for 45 days. And I was like, I'm going to say those words on your show.

[01:59:40] I'm just going to show you something. It was kind of crazy. The amount of work it took to be in 45 days. But I am going to be sporting it. Not for Halloween. But the next time there is a gathering of like-minded civic people in a town square in my vicinity, I shall be wearing my giant chicken costume. Oh, I like it.

[02:00:08] And I'm going to write taco right across that. Oh, nice. Right across that. That's awesome. I know. You've got to be careful. I was going to rally here just to take pictures because I got this kind of 2017 Leica. And I wanted to go and practice. Oh, fun. It's a Leica CL that's really beautiful. And man, the creativity and the signs that people were coming up with were so good. I was like, I got to get a picture. The signs are amazing. And you know what I'm loving is how peaceful it is.

[02:00:37] Because, of course, our Constitution of the United States guarantees, protects your right to peaceful protest, to peaceful assembly. And that's a constitutional right, the First Amendment. So I love it that people, instead of setting fires, they're just wearing inflatable costumes. Although- The frogs are sold out. You can't be a frog for Halloween. You can't get a frog. That's why I got a chicken. Well, the other reason I got it is because I heard that in one case, the National Guard put the tear gas in the-

[02:01:06] Pepper spray in the vent. Spray into the vent, the fan that keeps us inflated. So I thought, maybe if my head's not inside the chicken, that would be a better place. Ours was a little bit more calm than that. You know Hawaii, we just have food, bro. We got a lot of people, and then there's food. I love it. There's all these instructions about how to put it on, because apparently people can't figure it out. And they say, you're inside the chicken walking. Please don't put your head in the inflatable chicken.

[02:01:38] I love it. Anyway, Doc Pop. Where can I get a Doc Pop? DocPops.com. Two Ps, though. Two Ps. Two Ps. Two Ps in the Doc. The other one was stolen. Or, you know, squatted. I don't know why. But these are- You know what? I know a number of people who use these. These are great pop filters. You've done a wonderful job. Thank you. I don't make one small enough for Richard's Countryman, but maybe one- Yeah, no, I can't do anything but a little define here. It's a tiny little pop filter he's got. Yeah, I know.

[02:02:08] I've got two- Sounds amazing, though. It's a good mic. Priced accordingly. And I've had it for a lot of years. Yeah, we used to use those all the time. Yeah, I got these for panel discussions, because when you put them on people's head, then when they look at each other, it doesn't change the phase on the mic. Oh, I thought you were doing your Janet Jackson era. Yeah, no, then I'd have the aluminum cones on as well, which is a whole other thing. Dang it. They're hard to pack. Ask me how I know.

[02:02:35] But your doc pop fits a variety of microphones, including the Shure MV7, which is the podcaster microphone of choice. Oh, yeah. That was one. The only reason why I did it was because of pod mics, because nobody had anything for pod mics, and Rode was doing really good with those. And then the pod mic one would fit a Heil PR-40, because I have one in the drawer. Oh, it would. Oh, well, now I'm going to order some. It just won't look as cute as that setup you got, though. Oh, man. I like how cute it looks. This is not...

[02:03:05] I love this. Dear YouTube, this is not an adult product. It is a microphone cover. Stop banning my products. Mahalo. They think it's an adult product? Dude, I got... The YouTube store has banned my products so many times, and I'm like... What? Oh, because it's called a muff? I have no idea. I didn't even have that word on there. It's because I guess if the AI is looking at the picture, you don't know what it is. Well, especially the flesh-colored one, right?

[02:03:34] You should never have made a flesh-colored doc pop. That's the hot dog. I was like, I'm over this. YouTube is killing me. Hot dog or pop? What is it? That's funny. All right, we'll be back with more in just a bit, but first a word from our sponsor. Suddenly very popular in Australia, ExpressVPN. This is the only VPN I use, the only one I trust, the one I recommend to all you Australian teenagers.

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[02:07:25] Thank you, ExpressVPN, for protecting us. We appreciate it. ExpressVPN.com slash twit. Okay, back to the show. So Bill Gates, I'm sure there are others invested in this, but he is a very well-known investor. He calls us in there. There's a bunch of tech billionaires involved. Yeah. In a new form of kind of, would it be safe to say this is one of the modular

[02:07:54] nuclear power plant technologies? I mean, sort of, not really. Modular is not well-defined anyway. But they're small, right? They're not as big. This would be a 350 megawatt where typically light water reactors like the new AP-1000s that were built in Georgia just recently were 1.2 gigawatts, which is actually four 300 megawatt loops together per reactor. So what's the point of making a smaller reactor? Well, in this case, it's because it's a test article. Oh, okay. They want to prove the model.

[02:08:24] They could make big ones down the road. You would make multiples of these. And then one of the clever things about the design is a way to make multiples of these. So typically a nuclear reactor, I remember from playing a game on my Atari 400 called Scram, where you were operating a nuclear power plant and there was, I don't know, earthquake and emergency. And when the reactor core is breached or there's, even if you just want to turn down

[02:08:53] the amount of power you're generating, these rods, these nuclear rods are submerged into a liquid that stops the reaction, right? Well, they go between the core. So now we're the core assembly. These are solid fuel rods immersed in water. The water works both as what they call the working fluid, the thing that transmits heat and the moderator. And you slide these rods of boron, which is a neutron absorber between them and stop the reaction. So the rods are what's slowing down the chain reaction. Okay.

[02:09:23] But the air in the water is both a coolant, it cools them, but the heat then transfers to turbines which generate electricity. There's an intermediary step there. That water is radioactive. It's contaminated by the rods. Oh, never mind. So you keep that in a, what we call a primary loop. You also pressurize it so it can get hot enough to make the turbines make sense. And then you use a steam generator basically on a secondary loop to make steam. So there's no contact between the steam and the coolant. And that's normal. Primary loops, separate loops, the way you do this, it's safe,

[02:09:53] it's appropriate. And for this particular reactor design, even more important. So they use now not, they use sodium. Yes. That's what makes a natrium reactor different. That's why the word natrium. And in this case, natrium is the working fluid. Sodium is the working fluid. There is no moderator. This is what's called a fast neutron reactor. And we've experimented with fast neutron reactors the entire time in the nuclear industry. The upside of fast neutron reactors is they're somewhat simpler. The downside is

[02:10:22] they're very hard to control. Putting control rods in them is difficult. And so most of the time we have problems with them. They damage themselves and so forth. Then one of the innovations, you know, the upside of using molten sodium is it carries so much heat you don't need to pressurize it. So you don't have the problem of pressurized piping and so forth. But you do have the problem of molten sodium. It's opaque so you cannot see anything in the reactor if and when it's running. It also burns in atmosphere and catches,

[02:10:52] it explodes in water. So putting a natrium fire out is not a trivial problem. On the other hand, it's not pressurized so it would tend not to explode. It's usually steam explosions we're dealing with anyway. And as soon as it cools below about 100 degrees centigrade, it turns into a solid anyway. So there are some upsides except for that part where now it's exposed to atmosphere so it burns and explodes and creates more fires. But the upside of the fast neutrons

[02:11:21] is that it tends to make fewer fission products. Moderated neutrons or what they call slow neutrons make cesium and iodine and other materials that stay radioactive for a while. Fast neutrons tend to break atoms down better so it's a good way to burn fuel up. What's innovative in the TerraPower design and the design that Gates has designed is by using fluorine salts to transmit off of the primary loop into the secondary loop, they don't have to turn

[02:11:50] the reactor down. They can just leave it running all the time which is the safest way to operate a fast reactor. You get it up to full power, you leave it at full power all the time and you just keep dumping heat into your molten salt storage tanks and then use as much as you need against your turbines. When you have ecstasy you just put more because fluorine salts can get to a thousand degrees centigrade and they're still perfectly stable. Oh, that's interesting. So, they're avoiding the main issue which is you don't need to constantly control

[02:12:20] the rate of reaction inside the reactor which is the hard part with these fast neutron reactors. So, that's the rods going up and down to slow and... You don't need to do that because you're not trying to manage the water so carefully. You have sodium and the sodium doesn't need as much care in feeding. Yeah. Right? There is problems with servicing. Eventually you're going to need to refuel it which means now you do shut it down then you have to pump all the sodium out. Any traces left behind when you open the reactor

[02:12:49] or replace the cores are going to burn. So, you really need to flush things out like that whole process is tricky. But otherwise this would be a nuclear waste burner if you can make it work right. It breeds new fuel and it will burn it up fairly well. Is this a breeder reactor then? It's a kind of breeder reactor but the trick with the reader reactor if you just keep going with it it eventually shatters everything and you're left with lead.

[02:13:18] So, it does break things down. Right. But eventually as the fuel gets to that point it starts to slow down anyway and you have to change the fuel up. Didn't we try this? We've Yeah, reactors at Argonne. Argonne had a fast breeder reactor. We've built lots of fast breeder reactors. The Russians used to have one running What's the other one? FFFT FFFF something they tried to do like a fast fast something test facility. Yeah.

[02:13:47] They built a bunch of them. Yeah. It's just that they're very tough to manage and the problem and the argument is we've been trying to manage them like slow neutron reactors and that's a mistake and so TerraPower is trying to come at it from a different direction. It's still pretty experimental. They have lots of concerns with this. I mean I'm glad they're doing an experiment and they don't have a license to build a nuclear reactor right now. Like they they currently have a license to build the turbine side and the molten salt side.

[02:14:17] That's it. They are still trying to get their traveling wave reactor design approved enough to actually install it but I guess they have enough money to build half of this system. It's just the non-nuclear half. Okay. So why so Bill Gates put a lot of money into this. That's why they have a lot of money. TerraPower is his investment. There are others. But why do we need nuclear reactors? Don't we aren't we I mean look what's happening

[02:14:47] in China with with renewables like China's also building a lot of nuclear reactors too. The challenge on the power grid is baseload power right. All of our renewables are intermittent even hydroelectric is intermittent. When you when can you generate power under any conditions that doesn't fluctuate and that is non-carbon emitting and when it comes to baseload non-emitting energy nuclear is it. So we don't need a lot of it. You wouldn't use you know we're always going to use a combination

[02:15:17] of solutions but for baseload power especially this is what where nuclear comes to play and I would argue with the contemporary light water reactors we have now with the AP1000s which we have a pair in Georgia there's now going to be a couple built in Florida we have a very safe light water reactor design already. That's of course the question. It's there's no there's no issue about pollutants you're not burning anything but there's the issue of the nuclear waste and there's an issue of safety and so do these

[02:15:46] new designs they're safer? Yeah all three Gen 3 plus designs have passive shutdown we can question that with this particular reactor just because of the nature of sodium reactors that they just have more significant failure modes where the water reactor designs are now so mature they're what they call walk away safe they literally don't have enough thermal mass to damage their cores they will naturally recirculate water on their own and so then you

[02:16:16] you know we talked about the last May one of the ways when I talk about nuclear power is to say you know how rare nuclear power accidents are? You know the names of them yes there are electrical generation accidents typically fatal ones several a year making electricity is dangerous it's just that we don't talk about those ones they're not remembered nuclear power accidents are so rare it's like the self-driving vehicles versus gas well and so Fukushima the last major accident

[02:16:45] we've heard about reactor one through three you know four was shut down at the time you forgot about five and six there were actually six reactors there but five and six were both Gen 3 reactors that were more modern then one through four and they had passive shutdown so the earthquake happened they were all scrammed nobody was generating electricity and those two reactors just cooled themselves down that's as they do the others needed to have water pumped over them and then the tsunami overtopped the tsunami wall

[02:17:26] there were two things to know about the waste one is it's not very much and so even with the amount of nuclear power that we would need it's relatively easy to manage and we can do that the second is we could be reprocessing the fuel it's not it's something the French have always done it's more expensive to do than just using new fuel and storing the old stuff but it makes far less waste if you do it that way at the end of a six year run on a set of cores for a light water reactor

[02:17:55] it's still 95% uranium it just needs to have the fission products taken from it it needs some additional enriched uranium added to it and it can be used again which is what the original plan was except that we found there was far more uranium than we knew and it was cheaper to make new rods than to reprocess old rods so we stopped plus some political things but we'll leave that part out and in theory you store that fuel in a way where you could retrieve it when you do mature a design like this one that will actually consume high actinides

[02:18:24] in its process or any of the molten salt reactor designs that are also able to do that so there's a case for operate these things knowing you can store the fuel reasonably and knowing you can reprocess it at a later time and you can store it somewhere so part of the problem is what is the half-life of the waste if you leave it as a high radioactive as it stands a typical reactor is going to produce one large can every two years that has a 10,000 year

[02:18:54] burn down time and that barrel of nuclear waste would be hazardous to human life for 5,000 years 10 yeah a full 10 and probably longer and the challenge there is actually you've got to continue in a way that that thing's going to stay unbreached but still you'd want to set it up so you can retrieve it because very likely if you mature some of these other designs you're going to use that as fuel yeah well and that's the Finns now have a storage facility for their light water reactors based on exactly that design that given

[02:19:23] the maturation of a waste burner they will take that fuel out and use it as fuel they'll retrieve it there's been a there's a Wikipedia article about it there's been an interesting side business of creating nuclear waste warning messages that people 10,000 years from now when languages change and so forth might be able to understand if you think about it I mean yeah I like I like your your thought that probably we'll be able to use it and reduce the waste

[02:19:53] considerably if not one would argue we could dump even more money into this design and get to that point but right the come of the molten salt you know I just spent some time with Copenhagen Atomics and those guys using the thorium cycle could be burning up waste as fuel as well there's a bunch of ways to do this we need these technologies and if we spend the money to mature them we have ways to put you used to it again it's not going to be the only way we'll generate electricity you'll only need a handful of these plants I would argue the United States needs 16

[02:20:23] for their base load generation combined with various renewables and geographic opportunities like hydroelectric and the Brockies and you're there and at least you have but you have stable base load that is reliable and of course all of this is going to become more and more of an issue as AI demands more power consumption continue to expand for whatever reason it's not just AI I mean we say AI and AI takes I think a lot of heat for that but we're using the internet like crazy we're using power for all sorts of things

[02:20:53] we're also finding consequences for using natural gas in homes and so we're pushing towards more heat bumps and induction heat and induction cooktops and so forth houses are going to consume more electricity we need to provide more right it's just going to be what's happening this is a great article on wikipedia because besides I mean you can see what an interesting challenge this is to make a sign that would somehow keep people from digging where there's nuclear waste without them knowing English or what the nuclear waste symbol is

[02:21:22] and one of the things I would expect we're going to dig it up before we get to that point I hope that's the case we don't have to worry about it that one of the things Sandia has done is come up with some physical markers that are not signs there's something they call the landscape of thorns which is a mass of many irregularly sized spikes protruding from the ground in all directions this gives you a sense of this is not a friendly place don't want to be here come here menacing earthworks

[02:21:52] large mounds of earth shaped like lightning bolts emanating from the edges of a square site that'd be visible from air an enormous slab of basalt or black dyed concrete rendering the land uninhabitable and unformable I'm a fan of the landscape of thorns I think that might be kind of it might be kind of effective the problem with these kinds of techniques is that people of the future might think something valuable is buried there because someone's trying to protect it whatever it is somebody put a lot

[02:22:21] of energy into keeping us away from this I think we better dig that's why we created the pyramids right maybe those were a landscape of thorns we just didn't know any better well it the nuclear power talk's been very popular for and we explore all these subjects for that it's fascinating it's really fascinating and I I think we all acknowledge that we know we need to we're not going to cut back on our need for energy at all it's only going

[02:22:51] to expand we also know that we cannot burn fossil fuels indefinitely a we're going to run out b we're polluting the planet to the extent that it will not be habitable if we continue to do so so we've got to find some alternatives and we have them we just have to choose to use them we've made we've made nuclear power more difficult than it needs to be and we're starting to overcome that what about fusion is that anywhere on the horizon or is that just a pipe dream well it's

[02:23:21] you know for a long time for more than 50 years they said it was 50 years away now they're like AGI right and that's sort of a 20 it's 20 years away thing there is some progress meeting made spots EIDR is getting close to first light the fact that Commonwealth Fusion is working on the Rebco based magnetic coils which are much more powerful for making a smaller talk about that's capable of it Tribe Alpha Energy

[02:23:50] out of western Washington with their pinch design is interesting like there's and many have tech billionaires behind them Gates is in on a Commonwealth I think Bezos is involved with Tri Alpha like there's involvement everywhere so well these guys have more money than God they can afford to spend a few billion on highly speculative things it's very hip to have your own nuclear fusion project as a tech billionaire they have Ganty and for those of you in American schools who never learned about any of this

[02:24:22] nuclear power works with fission just like a nuclear bomb splitting up atoms and creating highly radioactive side effects but fusion works like the sun does which is by breaking down larger molecules into small I mean baking hydrogen atoms and baking into helium atoms so they're harmless in other words into lithium lithium into beryllium and breaks down when you get to iron and your star goes red

[02:24:51] giant and everything dies the big difference of course is the sun uses gravity to do its fusion and we if we try and do that we lose the planet which is not a good outcome we're trying to do magnetic containment you want you want a way of creating energy that doesn't take more energy to work than it creates and at this point with fusion we're trying to get the phrase is Q the measure is Q so we're trying to get a Q of 1 which is that as much energy as we put into the

[02:25:21] fusion reaction is emitted from the reaction not captured just emitted and we haven't gotten to that yet we still put in more energy than is actually emitted in the fusion reaction so far and realistically for a power plant you need a Q of about 50 because you're going to have losses in capture and conversion so we're just a long way away but arguably the biggest issue with fusion if you're really going to get serious about this and I'm sorry we're in the weeds is the lowest temperature fusion we can handle right now

[02:25:50] is deuterium tritium fusion so these are isotopes of hydrogen deuterium has one neutron normally hydrogen has none deuterium has two and is a radioactive compound that second neutron doesn't hang around for very long somewhere in the neighborhood of a few weeks it's going to pop off and so deuterium is naturally occurring you can find it in ocean water we extract it that way it's a bit expensive to do but it's not catastrophically so but tritium is basically not naturally occurring we have to breed it from lithium six and that takes a lot of

[02:26:20] energy we currently make a few grams of tritium a year we primarily use it to seed our thermonuclear bombs and now we're going to need kilos of it to be able to run fusion reactors with it and that takes a lot of energy in an infrastructure we don't have and it emits neutrons in its fusion reaction but it's the relatively low temperature one there are other fusion reactions we can use that are anisotropic they don't emit neutrons and they use common

[02:26:49] compounds the lightest of which would be a boron proton fusion but that's a tenfold increase in energy requirement to operate that reactor so yeah we're close to being we can make that reaction happen but it's not actually efficient enough and we don't have any way to make the fuel at scale so there's a few problems just speed bumps on the road to the bright future if they did invent it boy it was great

[02:27:19] the world everything would change right well they keep talking about power too cheap to measure and then you get into except you need to make the fuel and you'd have to do the capture systems and you have to maintain this is why i'm kind of fond of the idea the sun is beaming all of this energy to us all the time we just need to get better at capturing that energy whether it's solar or wind or geothermal or something at geostationary orbit it's about 1350 watts per square meter

[02:27:49] so i know it's all that energy but we really use a lot of energy so to be able to capture enough sunlight to make a gigawatt you need a collector several kilometers in diameter it's they're big yeah and it's that's complicated right it just takes a lot of space to collect that amount of power and our current photoelectric approaches are about 20% efficient so you're getting typically less than 200 watts per meter but it's not just solar there's also wind there's also

[02:28:18] tidal action there's all sorts of interesting ways to capture the energy yeah the earth is generating it just takes you know it takes time and complexity and it doesn't work all the time well there's incentive now that's and it's improving by far solar is our cheapest power generation source the second cheapest is wind yeah you know we've matured to those technologies to the point where we're building them in fact you know again I'm working on my scripts for the power geek out for the end of the year and even with

[02:28:47] all the effort that the current administration has gone against renewable energy the United States is going to end up in the end of 2025 building a huge amount of solar and wind record year quantities economics dictate it if nothing else it's the cheapest power source why would anybody turn away from it right where can people obviously you're not going to put your talks on YouTube because my talks are on YouTube are they yeah you can search for Richard Campbell nuclear power you'll see this talk oh well thank you

[02:29:17] is that you or somebody else did that that's that's part of my deal with the NDC folks is they do those publications it's all on YouTube isn't it doc that's right dude everything is there and when he said the reactor in Georgia was 1.2 gigawatts I was like is it 1.2 or 1.21 there it is somebody's put the link in our in our club to discord yeah 300 yeah they really efficient cost effective

[02:29:46] GE triple cycle steam turbines are about 300 megawatts 320 depending on the model and so we tend to build all our steam generators per turbine which is why you see these units of 300 on all these reactor designs there'll be 600, 900 1.2 is a couple of 1.5 in other parts of the world because it's just the number of steam generators that you use and that's same if you're doing coal same if you're doing oil even natural gas although combined cycle is a little more complex they still have a 300 megawatt

[02:30:16] turbine involved in that it's just a normal pattern you know you said something and then Leo was cracking the joke about everything being on YouTube but I just discovered something recently that I have no idea how I didn't know because I used to be there pretty much every weekend but you know that during the whole coal boom in West Virginia there was a situation where they were trying to unionize and then the mafia dudes that kind of ran the coal mines didn't want them to unionize and their form of protest was to wear red bandanas

[02:30:46] so the word that we use redneck has nothing to do with being from the south redneck comes from the coal miner protesting for their unionization so to this day in certain towns in West Virginia you know how you have the banners that go across the street for decorations they use red bandanas red bandanas as the decoration so we have been miscoining the word redneck for many many many years soon everybody in northern California will be called a chicken foot and I just

[02:31:15] I want to be the first to say that we're going to take a break and wrap up with some fun final stories by the way you may have noticed we didn't talk about AI once practically this whole I mean crazy talk yeah normally it dominates the conversation but there have been plenty of other things to talk about this week we're glad to have you here Doc Rock of YouTube fame and Richard Campbell of Windows Weekly and .NET Rocks fame

[02:31:43] and Runners Radio fame our show today brought to you by Zscaler the world's largest cloud security platform and actually AI is a real topic of discussion at Zscaler see in business AI is both a wonderful thing and a nightmare obviously the potential rewards of using AI in your business are too great to ignore but so are the risks not only the risks of bad guys using AI

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[02:34:12] AI attacks guaranteeing greater productivity and compliance learn more at zscaler.com slash security that's zscaler.com slash security this is a solution everybody needs to check out zscaler.com slash security city I guess this is worthy of notice if you're a hacker one of the things hackers like to do is put the game

[02:34:41] doom on everything from wrist watches to little raspberry pi devices but this is the weirdest one I've ever seen a programmer from Iceland Olafar Warge a senior software developer who now works in Norway showed off at the Ubuntu summit how he a self-described professional keyboard typist and maker of funny videos

[02:35:12] ended up making what is the outlandish port of doom yet it's running on the European space agency's OPS sat satellite it's a flying lab for testing novel onboard computing techniques it has an experimental computer on board more powerful than typically 10 times more powerful than typically used on a spacecraft Wag explained OPSAT was the first of its kind devoted to demonstrating drastically improved mission

[02:35:42] control capabilities when satellites can fly more powerful onboard computers so it's an onboard arm dual core cortex a9 processor not the fastest thing on earth ever but he decided he was going to get chocolate doom 2.3 which is an open source version of doom to run on it it was already running ubuntu lts 18.04

[02:36:11] lts he says chocolate doom has libraries available for 18.04 he literally updated the software from earth in orbit he says it's relatively straightforward to see few external dependencies it's easy to port the only sign doom was running in space at first was a lone log entry so the team used the satellite's camera to snap

[02:36:41] real-time images of the earth and then swapped doom's mars skybox for actual satellite photos they took a screenshot from the satellite and put it in the sky i i let me see if the image is here on this article from zdnet um pretty wild there's no gaming consoles in space apparently it ran beautifully because it's on a bunch of no there's no images shoot

[02:37:12] i was hoping we could see doom running on a satellite but you just have to use your imagination well if they can run doom on a satellite i guess we can probably do nuclear fusion i'm just thinking possibly all right one ai story i'll put one in people are begging the federal trade commission for help saying chat gpt has created psychosis in them

[02:37:42] several attributed delusions paranoia and spiritual crises to chat gpt on march 13th a woman from salt lake city called the ftc to file a complaint against chat gpt on behalf of her son who was experiencing a delusional breakdown ah well this might this might explain it chat gpt was advising him not to take his meds and telling him his parents are dangerous that seems like a legit complaint

[02:38:12] let's face it the software is not telling them that the software is an obsequious fan that always thinks everything you do is excellent so it takes a minor personality quirk and turns it into a full bone multiple health crisis by just reinforcing your thoughts to you over and over again good point in the latest update of five they even added a sycophancy patch in order no I'm not even joking this is that it upset the customers

[02:38:41] yeah they added a sycophancy patch in order to try to quell some of this and the reason why I wanted to speak about it because like you know of course AI is being told to be scary by everybody and I'm not a conspiracy theorist I swear I'm not but every time we do something that's going to make us smarter and all of us OG techs remember this the default from everybody in power is what people can't get too smart so let's just tell them it's dangerous

[02:39:10] so all the way back from CompuServe to AOL to you know being able to Wikipedia like everything as it got we are able to find out more information they just told us it was scary and yes I can see how this could be negative and I can see where it could go but I mean you kind of don't really need AI for that either because we had humans in the world very famous ones where they're constantly surrounded by yes people sycophants and then they get more and more you know

[02:39:42] egotistical narcissistic Elon statistics I don't know what you want to call it but it is kind of wild that there was even a person who you wouldn't see striked as a person who would fall for this and he was in the YouTube version of this story the wired person put together and it goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover so going back to what I said hours ago about the loneliness epidemic there are people who are trying to have

[02:40:11] social conversations with their AI and I feel like I've added to the problem because I tell creators all the time to talk to their bot to help them figure out their listener avatar or their viewer guitar yeah it's great for stuff like that yeah but you know if you're asking it like oh you know when I started doing my ADHD journey I was super late to the game but I finally decided to go after hanging out with a bunch of my friends at Macstock you know

[02:40:41] people that I used to work with and they go dude you're one of us you're definitely on a stretch you should actually talk to somebody and I went to go see my you know what I'm saying like Leo was like dude you didn't have to tell me I've known that for years about you but I always thought you know like oh I can just keep getting away with it well as you get older and your memory gets worse well you can't keep getting away with it the tricks that we probably use to deal with it don't work as good when you start that's true that's a good point yeah right and so you know I'm seeing my therapist whatever and I could just imagine like if I

[02:41:10] tried to have these conversations I have on my therapist with Chad GBT I might get wildly different answers the problem of course is you can't expect somebody who is mentally ill to necessarily have the discrimination to know I shouldn't be using this and if we live in a place where you can't get that kind of services without you know costing an arm and a leg I am you know blessed that my company gives us decent health care so you can can you imagine someone who hears from somebody else who has a therapist tell them that oh you have some form of autism or some sort of

[02:41:40] you know dissociative disorder you say okay let me go talk to Chad GBT because well it knows a lot of stuff and it can mess you up like I totally get that and I was recently talking to a doctor who says they have a subset of these LLMs that's made for doctors where you have to have your MPI number to go in and talk to it but it is well controlled and they're like yo we're able to do so much more with diagnosis and sharing you know things in the journal and peer testing and all that so it's phenomenal but you don't hear about those stories you hear about the people

[02:42:10] who told it like oh should I increase my dose and then they took too much and got sick or something you know and yeah unfortunately you know this AI is such a new technology that we are perhaps giving it too much credence in some cases like the Baltimore school that used AI to detect guns of course I understand why schools you know really think this is an important thing to do there's a company called Omni Alert

[02:42:41] that has alert software that is an AI gun detection tool company says magnets or metal detectors it works with cameras yeah so it's shape recognition yeah unfortunately because that's never wrong a 16 year old student of course he was black which might have not helped I was going to ask this question are you telling me the answer right now yeah was thrown

[02:43:11] so the teenager had just consumed a packet of Doritos stuffed the packet in his pocket Omni Alert said he has a gun police eight cop cars showed up he's the teenager 16 year old teenager said they all came out with guns pointed at me saying get on the ground they cuffed him searched him found not a gun but a Doritos packet and let him go but imagine how

[02:43:40] he was sitting watching a football practice oh you went way cleaner than me dude I was going back to that old joke about in your pocket are happy to see me I was not going there I was not going there no no the kid was let go thank goodness because humans came and immediately noticed that it was not a gun but it was a Dorito bag but this is the problem I think we sometimes put too much trust into these systems

[02:44:11] all the time long before the LLM showed up we were already using the excuse of well

[02:45:02] you combined you help deal with it after somebody said something heinous to you it's like you're getting a double dose of unnecessary information put into your head so as general tab says in our club discord if they were cool ranch Doritos he should have

[02:45:32] the reaction was the problem wasn't it we're using AI is the new excuse for laying people off inappropriately in the end these are all people's actions and using the excuse of a piece of software told to this is how they're pitching this stuff

[02:46:03] so in a way it's the rush to all of the profit oriented stuff that you can do on it I mean do you remember the backlash the immediate backlash when Delta said we're going to use AI in order to just keep an eye on pricing for flights and everybody immediately went to Delta is going to use it to charge us more for tickets and that's not what they said they based on the load outs which

[02:46:33] is why there's such a-holes about you and your overweight packages and every one person that gets on the plane goes I am 52 pounds I especially

[02:47:03] US airlines charge more for over than others because like on Japan airlines if everybody there there's not that many people overweight on that flight trust me I'm there all the time right it's us and so we panic and we say that they're going to use it we got a pretty good case that they

[02:47:33] are doc right like that's if you're spending money on technology it's because you think it'll make you money oh yeah I think it'll make you money but sometimes to make the money isn't by raising a ticket is by making more tickets available so you have less chance to have an empty planes so yes you're making more money but it doesn't have my

[02:48:03] bad I apologize we listen about Allen Iverson what about what about Allen Iverson oh he's AI that's my running oh I get it AI oh yeah yeah we were talking about basketball that's it that's a ticket that is doc rock the master of YouTube director of strategic partnerships at Ecamm we still love our friends at Ecamm they made this show possible as they do all our shows thank you doc great to see you buy your doc pops

[02:48:32] at doc merch right doc merch dot com is that right yes 100% I'm gonna get a few right now you're learning how to code streams live those are coming those are big right now just sit down and work oh you know I did that okay so last year in December you know they do this coding challenge advent of code and I'm not a pro coder by any means I'm I am a complete novice but I love coding and I did four or five videos of me solving the first

[02:49:02] few days of the advent of code it was a lot of fun it's a lot of fun maybe I'm gonna build my home assistant and I'm gonna buy a green one and do HA on your yeah yeah it's fun I don't know why I need to buy a yellow power is yellow better than green Richard no well the yellow is the older one and it had integrated Zigbee in it which is kind of convenient it just didn't work as well as that external so I recommend the green I

[02:49:46] prove that I can take on something with no skills whatsoever and people will sit there and watch you go through it and I did that with DaVinci Resolve back in July I did DaVinci Resolve over 40 and 30 to show that even as an old cat I could learn something new I mean I kind of cheated because I've been a pro editor for years but it would still start something you have no idea about and just go in and stop feeling like everybody needs to be an expert to be online you just really gotta talk to people and I got a lot of good feedback from that they're like I'm so glad you're doing this because

[02:50:16] I thought only nerds can do this but I can use this program $129 for HA Green it's Richard Campbell certified and it's kind of a neat story really this whole home assistant thing is basically all they're all volunteers right it's just well they're now making enough money that they're paying some other people it's one of the good news open source stories where when they created their web proxy product called Navacasa so

[02:50:46] that you could use your phone client in order to support them I subscribed to Navacasa is it best to buy direct so they can get the most money either way it doesn't really matter in that respect but subscribe to Navacasa so you can use your phone client and they use that money to pay their developers so they can save the projects in that space so they can support more of them they've

[02:51:15] really pulled the non-aligned home automation community together so you don't have to be in the Google camp or the Amazon camp you can be in the everything camp this is the solution to big tech open source and home assistant for a while but then they

[02:51:45] decided that they didn't want to do it anymore and basically closed off their APIs and basically broke everybody that had an automation with them and within a week a group of home assistant guys had built a separate controller that you could connect to their system and bypass entirely and use Google with it as well there's plenty of

[02:52:15] DIY solutions but recently the home assistant folks have started shipping their own voice module and it's a fairly reasonable price still considered a beta and then you have a choice of using onboard voice recognition or if you'd like to use open AI you can you just a configuration setting you can send it out and pay for your open AI API or a local whatever you prefer so the level of functionality is up to you but the voice unit I've tried a bunch of different ones and the one that the HA guys are making has a good

[02:52:45] spousal acceptance factor it does the right thing when you call to it it makes a little chime to let you know it's heard you then you can give it the commands you want what device do you run it on is there a no it's standalone USB you just plug it in yeah it's a little it's a little pack of cards with a USB and then talks to your home assistant boss and it recognize

[02:53:14] what room it's in so we think of it like remember those little Google home pucks yeah like one of those except if you don't want it to make a trip to the cloud you don't have to you know the thing about HA is am am I local or cloud am I event driven or polling right and so ideally you want if you care

[02:53:44] about being able to function offline you on Amazon sky connect sky connect okay that's the word

[02:54:14] mahalo live shopping people this is the internet in 2025 every time I get Richard on a show I buy more stuff yeah well no I'm always like pumping you for information you're just a font of useful information that's Richard Campbell run his radio dot com is his home we'll see him on Wednesday good are you this will probably be the set for windows weekly just because it's going to be too

[02:54:44] late at the arena for that so yeah although maybe with Paul on the line I should be in the tub I could do the tub you could just pretend to be bathing you know Richard before the show began we my my my host decided it was a perk there's a huge bubble

[02:55:14] tub in the middle of this room right in front of him it's right in front of him you can't see I'm sitting beside it because I hate doing hotel shots with the bed in the bubble tub right so I shifted the plank around like I can

[02:55:44] set up against this so I'm sitting beside the tub using the plank for the computer and I've got my camera arm and light strapped take a my liver thanks you honestly I always thought of

[02:56:14] these shows and I hope that our wonderful listeners think of them as just sitting around at a bar at a table with good friends talking about things that we're interested in yeah I don't mind that I have it on my I'm going to go watch it thank you everybody for joining us we do twit every Sunday afternoon 2 to 5 Pacific 5 to 8 Eastern 2100 UTC middle of the night in Holland Holland what did say Holland for the Netherlands because we don't call

[02:56:44] it Holland you can watch us live on YouTube Twitch TikTok Facebook LinkedIn x.com and kick actually we're going to take TikTok out of that because it's too complicated for us we're working with them to try to make it a little bit easier but they don't really want people streaming the way we stream so but that's still plenty of other places you can watch live you don't even

[02:57:28] YouTube channel dedicated to this of course and finally the best way to get it is to subscribe that way you'll get it automatically just find your favorite podcast client and subscribe to Twitter it's free to do that and you'll get it automatically the minute we're done if not you could also join the club if you don't want the ads $10 a month we have a free two week trial

[02:57:58] we're Dutch merchants looks very Dutch yeah this is the East India company deciding whether to invest in Doc Rock's plan to find the passage the Northwest passage or something I think Doc's wearing the mayor's collar right there it's like in

[02:58:28] definitely have the better hat I have a very nice outfit if I had that outfit I'd be very happy thank you general dad the prompt was he says put these gentlemen in full proper 17th century English capitalist regalia so we are with the East India company thank you Richard thank you

[02:58:58] another twit is in the can