TWiT 1060: A Shortage of Shame - Why Black Friday Numbers Aren't What You Think

[00:00:00] It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech. Samable Salmon, my car guy is here. We'll talk about cars spying on you, Mike. Elgin, the gastronomad is here. We'll talk about AI with him. And from Windows Central, Daniel Rubino. We've got Black Friday sales data. The statistics are interesting and they may not say what you think they say. The end of the Ford F-150 and the Roblox problem is a symptom of something much worse. All that and more coming up next.

[00:00:30] On TWIT. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1060. Recorded Sunday, November 30th, 2025. A Shortage of Shame.

[00:00:55] It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. I have combined a lovely panel, as I do every weekend, with the help of Benino Gonzalez, who is on vacation.

[00:01:05] This Week in Anthony Nielsen. Hello, Anthony. Filling in for Benino. We always are looking. It's like a recipe. I remember Becky Worley told me this years ago. When you're putting together a TWIT, Becky said, you've got to have the meat, you've got to have the veggies, and you have to have the spice. I don't know who's who on this show. Mike Elgin. You're pretty meaty. Mike Elgin is here from Machines Society dot AI and Gastronomad.net. In the States for the holidays.

[00:01:33] That's right. I figured I'd try something different and I'm here in California visiting my family. Lovely. And having a great time. Good. Well, it's great to have you. Welcome back to our shores. Where are you going next? Well, we're going to Central America and we're probably going to take a trip in December, but haven't quite decided where. So just for fun.

[00:01:55] You got itchy. You're really itchy feet. I would be, if I were, you know, you and Amira, your wife, I would just say, let's stay here for a month. Yeah. But nope. Nope. Got a reason you say that is you have a house. You have a kitchen. You have all the things. Even when we're in California, we're still living out of suitcases. Ah, so you might as well. Why would we stay here? Why would we stay here? It's suitcases all the way down. That's Daniel Rubino. He's also here from Windows Central. Great to see you. I forget. Where are you, Daniel?

[00:02:26] Worcester, Massachusetts. That's right. Worcester. Lisa yesterday was reading place names for some reason. She said, Worcester, Worcester, Worcester. No one gets it right. Just ignore all the extra syllables in the middle. Yes. Or we just call it the woo. The woo. Woo. I like it. I grew up in Providence. So Worcester was just up the road a piece.

[00:02:47] Yes. Yes. I know Worcester well. And that in the middle from Ypsilanti, Michigan, my friends, I give you Mr. Wheelbearing's himself, Sam of Old Samet. Hello, Sam. Hello, Leo. How are you today? Hello, Sam. Our car guy. I am well. Whenever Sam's on, I always ask him, what you driving this week?

[00:03:05] I have a Mercedes AMG G63 in the driveway, which is the G-Wagon is one of the most capable off-road SUVs in the world. Nobody buys a Mercedes to go off-road. Well, and some people do, but what they do is they buy 25-year-old G-Wagons and then lift them and put proper wheels and tires. Because this one has 22-inch wheels with very low-profile tires. That's great.

[00:03:33] The only place you can actually take it is driving down Rodeo Drive to Gucci. That's who buys those. Yeah. In Beverly Hills, you know, Bel Air and in Miami Beach. That's where people drive these things. We were watching that. Nobody drives new G-Wagons off-road. Begonia, the new movie, last night. And she drives a Mercedes off-jeep. It looks like a Land Rover.

[00:04:02] At least it says, is that a Mercedes? I said, yeah. Yeah, that's a G-Wagon. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Those are pretty cool looking. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, they were originally designed in the late 70s by Mercedes at the request of the Shah of Iran. He wanted them for his army instead of Jeeps. You know, they wanted, you know, because Mercedes builds a lot of utility vehicles and trucks and buses and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, so they wanted a really good, durable, off-road utility vehicle. Yeah.

[00:04:32] And so Mercedes developed the G-Wagon. And just as it was ready to go into production, you know, they had a little problem there in Tehran. And he lost his job. Oh. Couldn't pay for him anymore. Yeah. And so Mercedes decided to sell. Just, well, you know, we got this. Let's just sell it to whoever wants it. And so they've been selling G-Wagons ever since. I think they're pretty cool looking. Mm-hmm. It's a little weird to see the Mercedes badge on something so utilitarian. Yeah.

[00:04:59] I was in the Cotswold about a month ago, a month and a half ago, and met an elderly English gentleman who told me the most Texan story I've ever heard. He used to be in the industry of shipping oil equipment around the world. And some Texan owner of an oil company said, hey, I know you ship equipment in these things, but can you ship my Rolls-Royce to Houston, you know, to Texas for me? And there's things like, well, what about customs? What about? He's like, don't worry about that. I'll take care of that. So the guy ships it to him.

[00:05:29] And then he later asked him, how's the Rolls-Royce going? He said, yeah, it's great. I converted it into a pickup truck. And he said, well, why would you convert a Rolls-Royce into a pickup truck? He said, are you kidding? I have the only Rolls-Royce pickup in the world. This is like, anyway, I just thought that was hilarious. It's like the mullet of trucks. It's a luxury in front and business in the back. The thing about Rolls-Royce though is, I mean, you wouldn't have to convert it yourself. You just say, build me one.

[00:05:59] Yeah, build me one. It's all handmade anyway. Like this, whatever color you want. They do things like they have these headliners with fiber optics in them that create a star field in the roof of the car. And if you want, they will, you know, you can give them any date and location and they will create the pattern of the sky on that night. So you can, you know, have the star pattern of the night you were conceived or something. Oh, good Lord. Yeah.

[00:06:30] I mean, they will, they will literally build, you know, a blank check. They will build whatever you ask for. And of course that fabulous British hand done wiring is always exciting. You never know what could go wrong. What could possibly happen? Did any of you buy a Rolls-Royce on black Friday?

[00:06:49] It's like the day of the night, this is we are Thanksgiving post Thanksgiving, a coma Friday, Black Friday, Monday is cyber Monday, which I don't think is meaningful anymore because that was all that was created in the day when you would wait to buy your stuff online to the, you went to work for the fast internet on Monday. but now people have faster than it at home. The whole thing has been diluted. All I've been doing is working that this weekend on our site. Black Friday is all, it starts in August. Well, Amazon started. It's been going for months.

[00:07:18] Amazon called Black Friday last Friday. It's like, they just cheat now. They just call whatever they want. It's cheating. Cyber Monday starts Saturday. It was always all made up. It's all diluted. It used to be like, as corny as it was, it was like a thing, right? Friday morning, people would go to the mall, line up and all this. And it was like an event. Now it's not an event. It's just watered down. I remember sitting outside Best Buy at four o'clock in the morning, waiting for the store to open.

[00:07:48] Right. Yeah. And then, you know, getting a TV and a receiver, something I can't remember what. Yeah. I remember reading about those stories of people getting trampled. Yeah. Remember the videos of people beating each other up. Holy cow. Those were the days. Those were the days. Mike, Paul Thorat always tells the story of when his son was little, of waiting outside of Target, I guess, to get the latest game. Call of Duty. The latest Call of Duty.

[00:08:17] And it's like, that's ancient history already, right? Everything's digital delivery. Well, according to spending reports, I think, is it Adobe? Whoever does these Adobe analytics. U.S. shoppers spent $11.8 billion on Friday online. Weirdly, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess the economy's doing all right. Up 9% from last year.

[00:08:45] This is still the biggest shopping day of the year. Yeah. AI-powered shopping tools, a big player in all of this, according to Adobe. And so this is the new thing. You know, let the AI do it. Except they buried the lead on this. The sale of actual items is down 1%. Right. And the sales are up mainly because of inflation and tariffs. Oh.

[00:09:12] And so this BS that sales are up and the BS that AI is involved, I've seen no evidence that AI had anything to do with this. Interesting. Yeah, the AI tools are not accurate right now. They exist. People are using them, but what's the correlation between using AI and boosted sales? I mean, it's just everything's more expensive. So this data is from Salesforce, which said order volumes were down 1%,

[00:09:41] average selling prices up 7%. Consumers purchased fewer items at checkout with units per transaction falling 2% on a year-over-year basis. So really, it's inflation. People are buying less and everything costs more. That's the story. Yeah. AI, though, increased 805%. AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites, eight times higher than last year, according to Adobe.

[00:10:10] Yeah, but keep in mind that when you're talking about going up 800% from a very low number, it's still not necessarily a very large number. Well, also, last year... When you're starting from zero, every percent has a huge impact. We didn't have Sparky and Rufus last year, either. Sparky, for those of you who are not in the know, is Walmart's AI tool. Rufus is Amazon's AI tool. Is any... Have you ever...

[00:10:38] Any of you ever clicked on Sparky or Rufus? No. No. I will say, though... I mean, these companies have done... Like, I like how Amazon has done some of this, right? So, assuming you believe the customer reviews, which there are separate tools to even gauge the accuracy of those. Right. I do like the AI summarization use of that, where they will summarize what customers are saying, and then they'll pick out key words about it and say, you know, which you can

[00:11:07] then click as hyperlinks and then learn more about that specific thing. So, say, if you're looking at a laptop, and it'll say battery life, and you click that, and it'll have a negative. You'll see what people just say about battery life. So, I think these are smart uses of this. But fundamentally, all this is proportional to the cost of the item. So, if something is like 10, 20 bucks, you may just use AI just to be like, here's the best thing. If you're going to spend $3,000 on something, you're going to ultimately want to see what

[00:11:37] a real human being is saying about it. And this is where I think the authenticity of this stuff kind of comes into effect, where you want to watch someone with real photos, real video, real life experience with the product, to sort of understand it better and sort of answer your questions. That's something AI I don't think we'll ever figure out. Amazon is interesting. Their current ad campaign doubles down on the reviews. Have you seen it? It's Benedict Cumberbatch, a real actor, reading real reviews.

[00:12:07] Can we really know it's really him? I didn't even think of that. Let me ask you this question. I mean, it could be a Sora cameo. It could be. Here I'm on Amazon. Happy holiday shopping. I'm Rufus, your shopping assistant. I can help you find gifts, compare products, check price history and more. I like the price history. That's a cool idea. But my answers are powered by AI, so I may not always get things right. So in honor of you, I'm going to, Daniel, I'm going to ask, what's the best price on

[00:12:34] a Copilot plus PC that I can get? Searching the web. It does have a button for price history of items in my cart, gathering products. Great news. What are the chances this will be on an Amazon deal? Oh, yeah, exactly. It says it's searching the web. Why bother? We know you're going to push me to Amazon. $259 for an HP Ultrabook. It'll be a sponsor to Amazon item. Yeah. That's a good price.

[00:13:03] Should I buy that, Daniel? A $259 HP Copilot plus PC? I mean, we've been seeing a lot of big sales with the Qualcomm. This one's Intel. But it's only got eight gigs of RAM. I don't know how it could be a Copilot plus PC. Don't they require more RAM than that? Not necessarily, but the NPU, if it does the 40 tips, it'll be okay. This is pathetic.

[00:13:31] There are two basic problems with Amazon's recommendation system. First of all, it has to be said that 25 years ago, Amazon was the king of product recommendations with books. Right. They were better than anyone. We'd never seen anything like it. They were able to tell you, based on what you bought before, what you would like to buy in the future. And that was based on what other people who bought those same books bought. And that worked great. Nowadays, there are two problems. First of all, they don't really want you to buy the best thing.

[00:13:58] They want to favor the people who are playing the Amazon game, the vendors that are jumping through the hoops that Amazon wants them to, profiting Amazon the most. So they're not really looking out for you. This is one of the reasons why they have the recommended products and so on. Always score higher. They always have higher scores, mysteriously, than a product just like it that hasn't been selected by Amazon to be a featured product.

[00:14:25] The second problem is when you ordered gifts, especially their only metric for knowing if that gift is for you or not, or some other person is whether you have a gift wrapped or whatever. But like they would know a lot more about what I want to buy for myself. If they knew which of the things are for my granddaughter, which of the things are for my wife, which of the things are for somebody else, my kids, whatever. I'm buying all this stuff.

[00:14:50] They couldn't possibly, based on what I buy on Amazon, profile me in terms of what I like to buy for myself. Is that why the recommendations are so universally awful? They often recommend buying something I just bought, which is kind of dopey. But look, I just clicked. They said, well, do you want to know which has the best battery life? And Daniel, it gave me, it said the HP Omnibook 5 16-inch has up to 34 hours. That's a Snapdragon, $450.

[00:15:19] Is that good advice? I mean, if you're looking for battery life, that saves me going to Windows Central. Well, so maybe, right? So the 34 hours, I think everybody on here probably realizes that that is unrealistic. That seems like a lot. That seems high. Yeah. So that's what the manufacturer claims. Right. So we reviewed that laptop and we have the real world usage and debts. And, you know. That's what you'd really want, isn't it? That's what you want, right?

[00:15:47] So everybody knows there's a difference between the marketing language. And that's where I think, you know. I know a lot of people in my job in this position hate AI. They're scared of it. For me, it's an opportunity. It's just how you take advantage of it. But I think for what we do, because we actually use these products, right? That's why I always joke about Windows Central. It's not like we review a laptop and we all go back to our Macs. Like we actually do use Windows laptops.

[00:16:17] So like we actually do have real good knowledge about what's good out there and what we highly recommend. And it's something that AI can't give you. Something that customer reviews are good. But they have their own problems, obviously, since there's astroturfing there. But that's where I think having... Well, that's the problem with Amazon's AI. I would prefer to use something like Perplexity or Coggy's Assistant or even ChatGPT and ask it.

[00:16:46] Because it's going to presumably give you more objective results. Especially if you know how to use it. If you're good at prompt engineering, you know how to do role prompting. Right. You can get really good advice, especially go in and drill down. And I've used different tools, AI tools, to get product recommendations. And I like to go in and based on what it tells me, I'm like, no, no, no, you're not really quite getting it. I really need something that's really light, lighter, light. That's the main thing.

[00:17:14] And you just go back and forth a bit and you can get really good advice. And once you have that advice, then you can go to the e-commerce sites and figure out where to buy it. I think so. For instance, Coggy told me, it's important to remember, real world battery life is highly subjective. Depends on specific tasks. It actually quotes reviews and then talks about benchmarks. There's Paul Thorat's site coming up on top. Forbes, Reddit, Tom's Guide.

[00:17:43] I'm sure Windows Central will pop up here. See, I think that's more useful. Full disclosure, my son works at Coggy, but yeah, Coggy's great. I really love, you know, I pay for a Coggy Pro subscription. And I prefer, I've actually started using that instead of Perplexity. I do like the idea of the AI orchestrators, the tools like Coggy's Assistant or Perplexity that pull in from multiple AIs and match search.

[00:18:11] Although now with ChatGBT5, they do the searches built in. But the real difference with Coggy is that there's no ulterior motive. You pay for it. That's their business model. You pay them and then they're helping you. Right. This is the opposite of what I was saying about Amazon. Amazon's trying to help Amazon. Right. And use you to help Amazon. Whereas Coggy, because you pay for it, is really trying to help you. Yeah. And, you know, getting into that a little bit more specifically, like Best Buy, I think has done a really good job.

[00:18:42] You know, Best Buy, if it was a different world, would be out of business at this point. But I think they've done a really good job in trying to pivot and combat Amazon. And so they often offer way better prices than Amazon on a lot of products that we endorse. So, and for some people, going to Best Buy is, one, you can just go down the street, pick up your item that day. And if you have a problem, you can return it, talk to a human being. I'm not saying Amazon's like bad for returns. They're actually quite good.

[00:19:10] But people still like having that ability. And so that's the problem with those AI engines, right? Yeah. Amazon wasn't just going to tell you the Amazon laptops, but that laptop could be a better deal, different configuration, doorbuster thing at Best Buy or Target or even Walmart, right? So, yeah, you do need to have an overarching AI almost to figure all that stuff out. But then fundamentally, you're going to want to come back to a human being and people have actually used these things.

[00:19:37] So we don't have the traditional brick and mortar store numbers yet. We have the, obviously, because that's a little slower than online, but it does look like initial forecasts are people preferred online to shopping in brick and mortar. I guess that's not really surprising. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's a trend that has been going on for a couple of decades now that that shift towards online shopping, especially- Retail next, global manager-

[00:20:07] Right. Right. Right. Retail next, global manager of advanced analytics, according to, this is a story from Forbes, said, the story isn't just that shoppers stayed home. It's that they're changing how and when they shop. We're seeing a consumer who's still spending, but doing it with surgical precision. They're waiting for the right price, stretching purchases across a longer promo window and walking into stores with far narrower emission than we've seen in past holiday seasons. That seems like that's internet-driven, search-driven, AI-driven. People are smart.

[00:20:37] Even when I go to Best Buy, I do all the research online and I figure out exactly what it is I want to buy. I walk in the door and actually, I mean, a lot of the times I'll just do the order online and just- Go pick that. Yeah. When it's ready, I go pick it up. But even if I don't do that, the only time I spend in the store is however long it takes me to actually find that item in that particular store and then buy it and then get out.

[00:21:05] I don't browse in the store anymore. You know, it's funny because we bought some furniture lately for one of my sons and we went up to customize, do all this kind of stuff. And the person in the store who was helping us was just using their website. I hate that. It's like going to a bookstore and they don't have a book and they said, well, we can order that for you and have it in five days. Right. I can order it for me and have it tomorrow. Right. Yeah.

[00:21:33] This is what's killing brick and mortar, I guess. Even with Best Buy, I was just going to say like with Best Buy, the stores are often pretty empty because just what we're talking about, right? A lot of people order online, then they go and pick it up, but you're only in there for a couple of minutes. This is the advantage of stores that are all purpose stores instead of just electronic stores. For example, my wife and I were going to buy AirPods Pro 3. We're going to buy it online. We hadn't gotten around to it, but we went to Costco for some other thing and there they

[00:22:02] had the same price as online. Plus they added Apple care for free. So we're like, yeah, what the heck do you want in the cart? Right. So Walmart and Costco and these sort of general purpose stores are more likely to capture people who would otherwise buy online. Whereas with Best Buy, you're not going to go there unless you're intending to buy a specific electronics product. Yeah. Costco also does exclusive configurations for a lot of laptops, which is pretty interesting. They're smart. People like Costco and the other big box stores because they have- Laptop, TVs, all kinds of things.

[00:22:32] Yeah. Very generous. They use their buying power to get very generous return terms for consumers. So it's easy to return stuff and they have a longer window than typical. It's more than that, actually. We actually bought this huge, huge, heavy table with a full set of chairs that was delivered and they put it together. I like that. And then there was a problem with one of the chairs and they came to the house, disassembled it and carried it away as the return at no charge.

[00:23:02] Wow. That's unbelievable. That really makes you want to buy stuff. They're smart. That gets people back in the stores. It says apparently, according to Adobe Analytics, that Gen Z did in fact go into the stores. For some reason, they like the mall. Maybe it's what you were saying. It's one-stop shopping, right? That they can go to one area, get their shopping done. It's a novelty to them. Look, they have many stores in one place. That's a miracle.

[00:23:33] If you can actually find a mall that has many stores. Well, that's right. Right. Boy, most of the malls I know of have lost their anchor tenants. You know, Sears and Macy's and so forth are gone. They're like a ghost. Here in Marlboro, it was just announced that the Apple store is pulling out of Marlboro Mall at the Salmon Pond. That's bad. And they're going to move to a different mall. Yeah. That's devastating to the mall because Apple is unique in mall retail.

[00:24:01] Basically, they gauge the quality of a store and which is an anchor, which isn't an anchor, other metrics based on the daily sales per square foot. And you could take the second highest sales per square foot. And Apple is 20 times higher. Yeah. Better than a Tiffany. Far more. Yeah. It's very. Yeah. It's very. I expect this mall to the Salmon Pond mall to shut down. Unfortunately. Yeah.

[00:24:30] That's a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. Fewer super big discounts this year. Absent from this year's promotions were last year's pervasive 60% off signs as retailers try to save price and mitigate the impact of tariffs on their margins. The season is rarely won on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Retailers continue to have to entice customers. Yeah. I haven't done my Christmas shopping yet. I don't know. I think people are smarter also about Black Friday.

[00:24:59] They understand that that's just, and this is what one of the analysts said, just a data point. It's not the story. It's just one thing. We saw a very, a very late swing with Black Friday, meaning that Thursday and Friday were really soft and we didn't see a lot of traffic. It wasn't until Saturday afternoon. We started to see traffic really pick up and it's pretty high right now going into Monday, but it's definitely, it was a very different experience where most shopping wasn't happening on Friday. Okay.

[00:25:29] And we saw that across the company. Are you just covering PC sales or do you, what do you, what? Well, this is, this is across our company in tech. Okay. So this is Tom's hardware, Tom's guide, tech radar. Yeah. All those. But it's tech tends to be tech. Yeah. Well, like I think like 70% of our revenue and our, and future is tech. Tech. Yeah. Well, it's not a bad place to be right now. No, no. I mean, it's a lot of it's going around, right? Yeah. It's doing quite well.

[00:25:59] All right. Let's take a break. We will talk about how well AI is doing, especially for the guy, one of the hosts of the all in podcast, New York times, little name drop for all in a show run by our friend, Jason Calacanis. In just a moment, you're watching this week in tech with windows central editor in chief, Daniel Rubino. I didn't mention that at the beginning of the show. I'll mention it now. It's nice to have you from Worcester from Ypsilanti.

[00:26:26] It's the host of the wheel bearings podcast and automotive analyst at telemetry, Samuel Bulsamed and Mike Elgin, our gastronomic nomad, gastronomic nomad, our gastronomad.net. His AI blog is machine society.ai. We'll talk about AI. There's a lot of AI news in that just a little bit.

[00:26:48] I was actually bemoaning this to Lisa when I was going through stories this week, because we have a show that's dedicated to AI intelligent machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martin on Wednesdays. And as I go through stories, I'm saying this one, allocating them to Twitter. And it was all AI stories. I don't have a long enough show on Wednesday to cover all these stories. So I'm going to move some AI into this show. I hope you don't mind. There's a there. This is one of those areas in tech.

[00:27:17] And I can't think of another time that it's been like this. Maybe you guys, maybe the Internet was like this, where it's just dominates, not just tech media, but it dominates the market, dominates everything right now. It's the big story of the year, probably the decade. Who knows? Maybe even in the century. We'll get to that in just a little bit. But first a word from our sponsor. And we're talking about AI invention. Vention.

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[00:30:30] Vention, V-E-N-T-I-O-N, Teams.com slash twit. Thank you, Vention, for your support of this week in tech. We appreciate it. You support us when you go to that website. VentionTeams.com slash twit. I woke up this morning in the New York Times. Big story about David Sachs, who is, of course, the AI and crypto czar in the Trump White House.

[00:30:58] You know, we were talking before the show about it's kind of hard to know what axe the Times is grinding at any particular time. But Sachs has definitely been very instrumental in the White House's AI action plan. Apparently, he was the guy who said, no state regulation of AI. We've got to find a way to stop that. Trump was considering an executive order. The last we heard is they're going to put it in the National Defense Authorization Act,

[00:31:25] which is a great way to, you know, put little earmarked pieces of legislation in because it's always passed, right? And very seldom is it edited. So it may well be that when the NDAA is passed that we suddenly have a federal law banning state laws against AI. That includes California, Illinois, a lot of states trying to regulate AI. But Sachs represents the industry.

[00:31:53] He has this kind of stunned me. 700 and some. 700,000 tech investments, including 449 stakes in companies with ties to AI that could be aided directly or indirectly by his policies, according to the New York Times. No conflict of interest there. 450 investments. His public filings designate 438 of his tech investments as software or hardware companies,

[00:32:18] even though the firms promote themselves as AI enterprises, offer AI services, or have AI in the names. And then, nice little plug. For the podcast, AI podcast, All In Podcast, which I don't think was intentionally AI, but I think it's become AI. He's certainly helped the All In Podcast become number one. I guess there's nothing really to say about it. I'm just jealous.

[00:32:47] I thought, I wish I had a position in the White House that I could promote our podcast with. Yeah. Maybe not. I mean, I think in general, it's theoretically a good idea to have national policy on something like this rather than state policy. And let's be honest, when we're talking about state policy, we're talking about California. All the AI companies are in California, most of them anyway.

[00:33:10] And California is a little bit more like Europe in terms of its regulatory outlook. They tend to be more consumer protectionist and that sort of thing. And I don't particularly trust this administration. I mean, the reality is, if we're being honest, is that it's, you know, with the Trump administration, it's kiss the ring and win some prizes. Right. He tends to look at people, individual people who own things.

[00:33:35] And if they play ball with him, he plays ball with them. There's also the- If you bring enough gold bars or trinkets. Exactly. Or a crown maybe or a jet. But separate from that, there's an interesting dichotomy here. On the one hand, I understand the AI company's points of view that you don't want a patchwork quilt of 50 states regulations to wend your way through.

[00:34:02] If there were a single federal regulation that they could adhere to, that they understood, that would be- And in ideal circumstances, that would be absolutely true. Yeah. Ideally, you want a single federal regulation. But the problem is we live in a time where we have a regime in Washington that is fundamentally opposed to any regulation on any industry in which they could be making money.

[00:34:27] And so, you know, in the absence of federal regulation, we still need something. And if the feds aren't going to do it, unfortunately, we have to rely on the states to do it. And, you know, this applies in so many areas, not just AI, but in so many other areas. I'm going to confess to being an AI fan, an AI accelerationist. I'd like to- You know, in the early days of the internet, the policy of the government was hands-off.

[00:34:57] This is a nascent technology. Let's see what happens before we regulate the baby, before it gets to grow up. So, in a way, I don't know. I might be in favor of minimal AI regulation. Okay. Yeah, but there are two issues we're talking about. Tell me why that's a bad idea. Well, there are two issues we're talking about. We're talking about the degree of regulation. We're talking about who does the regulating, whether it's states or the federal government. I like the way Europe does a lot of things because Europe is essentially what the United States was supposed to be,

[00:35:27] a bunch of independent states with an overarching regulatory framework. But oftentimes what they do is they issue guidelines. And so they say, here's what you ought to do. And most of the states go, okay, we'll do that. Right? So they do all the thinking. They do all the think tanking. They do all that stuff. They issue guidelines. And then there can be tweaks. I mean, we're talking about companies who are offering a product that can individually tailor for every single person on earth, an entire agent, assistant, or whatever.

[00:35:56] And they can't deal with 50 states. I mean, they can handle the different regulations based on states. It should be easier for AI than any other company. Regarding whether we start, you know, this is the old thing from the social network in terms of how much you regulate. We don't even know what it is yet. Why would we start, you know, messing with it? All that kind of stuff. I agree with you. I think we need to find out what happens while mitigating the harms to children. There's some clear harms that have emerged.

[00:36:25] We need to protect the public from those harms. But other than that, we, I think we really should find out where it goes before we start suppressing it. So David Sacks' response to the New York Times is, I'm suing your asses. He says it was a nothing burger story that they've been working on for five months and didn't find any smoking gun. But he says, as it became clear, this is his tweet. As it became clear, the New York Times wasn't interested in writing a fair story.

[00:36:54] I hired the law firm, Claire Locke, which specializes in defamation law. And he publishes the fragile egos. No kidding. No kidding. They're just like the most sensitive snowflakes. He calls it the New York Times hoax factory. Now, even now, maybe he'll sue Stephen Bannon, who has been, of course, a White House friend and foe.

[00:37:21] Bannon in the New York Times article is quoted as saying that Sachs is a quintessential example of ethical conflicts in an administration where, quote, the tech bros are out of control. They're leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy. That's Steve Bannon. I know. It's weird when you're like, I don't understand it. Yeah, I don't understand.

[00:37:45] And then this is the week the White House announced the ominously named Genesis mission, which is basically, I mean, if I were to encapsulate it in a sentence, the full speed ahead on AI. AI, let nothing get in our way. We've got to beat China mission. That's all this is about. It's China. And this is a conundrum we're in because everybody's like, AI is going to destroy us. And then everybody's like, well, maybe we should regulate it.

[00:38:13] And then all the states' rights people all of a sudden, no, you can't. No, states' rights don't apply here. It only applies to things that we don't like. And then it's like, well, we can't regulate because China won't regulate. And since they're not going to, if they get ahead, they're going to own this market. We don't want China's AI to destroy us. We want our AI to destroy us. Yeah, yeah. Red, white, blue AI to destroy us. So we just let it fly. And this is like why I'm, you know, it's like if it ends.

[00:38:43] It's hard to find moral clarity here. For instance, the Genesis mission, which really sounds like the blueprint for Skynet, is in fact doing something I think very good, which is releasing the Department of Energy has all of these great labs, like the Lawrence Livermore Labs, all over the place.

[00:39:01] And these labs have a lot of research, a lot of work, not just on weapons, on everything, on materials, science, on all sorts of stuff that we paid for, but that had been kept private because I guess presuming that enemy countries will use it against us or something. This releases that information to AI companies for training. That's alien technology. It's from all UFOs.

[00:39:28] This guarantees access to appropriate data sets, including proprietary, federally curated and open scientific data sets, in addition to synthetic data generated through DOE computing resources for use by private AI companies for their training. I think that's, I don't know. I think that's a good thing. This is why it's so hard to say.

[00:39:58] I'm not sure. It comes down to what your attitude towards AI is. If you think it's threatening to humanity, then of course you wouldn't want this. If you think it could be the most important invention humanity has ever come up with and could be transformational, then maybe you do want. I don't think AI in and of itself is necessarily threatening to humanity. I don't think AI is suddenly going to become sentient anytime in the foreseeable future and take over like a Skynet type of thing.

[00:40:25] The problem is as AI becomes more sophisticated, it's going to be abused by people. It's humans that are the threat to humanity. That's always been the case. Yeah, just as with any other technology.

[00:40:41] And the more powerful, the more capable AI becomes, the more ways there are for humans to abuse it and do things to society and to civilization and to the planet. I mean, not the least of which is the amount of energy and water that is used for all these data centers.

[00:41:03] I mean, Palantir and law enforcement agencies with AI is just a recipe for the surveillance state that we were told. I don't want Alex Karp, you know, sticking his fingers into all of our information. Ironically, though, remember Anduril, which is Palmer Luckey's company.

[00:41:26] Company, apparently Wall Street Journal is saying Anduril is stumbling in its tests with the military in combat. We do fail a lot, says Palmer Luckey. Defense startup Anduril hits setbacks with weapons tech. And this is part of the problem, too, is you invest in all of this snake oil in many cases, and it ends up being not so hot.

[00:41:55] There's Palmer Luckey in his Hawaiian shirt. He, of course, you may remember the name, was the creator of Oculus and the Oculus Rift, which he sold to Meta. And then left Meta under a kind of a cloud. I will say he was smart for pivoting towards defense because you get those contracts and you end up making, I mean, again, Palantir. You make a lot of money and those contracts stay locked in for a very long time.

[00:42:24] And there's not a lot of competition. I mean, in the defense industry, there are some really big players, obviously. But because his company is so much smaller that they can just innovate and fail faster than the big ones can. So he gets stuff done, I think, a lot quicker. Now, whether or not it'll be successful. The journal says Anduril's only real battleful experience in Ukraine has been marred by problems. In fact, the drones they made for Ukraine were so problematic, the Ukraine military stopped using them last year and haven't fielded them since.

[00:42:56] So anyway, but that's, you know, it's a new tech. This is AI. It's a new technology. Yeah. Supporting your point, Leo, we are hyper focused on the chatbot dimension. Which is not the most interesting part. And secondarily on the military. But actually, if you list the things AI is being used for, those are tiny, tiny parts of that list. It's being used for medical diagnostics, for emergency response.

[00:43:23] It's being used to power prosthetics for disabled people. It goes on and on and on. It's remarkable. I think the promise is incredible. Yes. And climate. And dealing with climate crisis. Well, yeah, so many things. Materials and science. When can AI predict when it's going to take over and destroy us? Yeah, that'd be great. Can AI predict when it's going to destroy our climate? Right. Well, okay. And then fix it. Because it's smart enough to be able to fix it.

[00:43:52] Well, yeah. And I also have to point out that, yes, AI certainly is using a lot of energy. But so is a lot of other things. So are many of the other things that we are doing in our lives. And in fact, in some ways, I think AI is driving, because it needs so much energy, it's driving a move towards a better renewable energy. No. No. They're just burning more natural gas and coal.

[00:44:22] Well, I know there is that. They're keeping ancient coal-fired power plants running. But get ready for this from Ars Technico. Over the course of 2025, solar's growth is almost enough to offset the rising energy use. That's mostly in China. No, it's in the U.S. according to. Yeah. Well, I think that's a temporary glitch, because I think everybody was scrambling this year

[00:44:49] to get stuff implemented, get stuff deployed before all of the tax breaks go away. But also, it's skewed in favor of what's happening in California. California, the amount of renewable, especially solar power that's come online in California the last four or five years is incredible. So the first nine months of 2025, electricity demand has risen by a, relatively speaking, slow 2.3%.

[00:45:16] It isn't the through-the-roof nightmare that people are describing. And solar has made a big difference in that, covering that rise. There's also a drop in natural gas usage, although coal usage is up by 23%. So this is the pie chart for where our electricity is coming from right now. Natural gas is 41%, 18% nuclear.

[00:45:45] That's the other thing. There's been a lot of work on modular nuclear plants, on natrium, sodium-cooled nuclear plants, on smaller nuclear plants. And how many of those have been deployed so far? None. My work, you know, it takes a while, Sam. It's not overnight. You got to, it takes a while to build these. And yes, sure, we recommissioned Three Mile Island. What could possibly go wrong with that? But I don't think it's 100% a negative story.

[00:46:13] I think it's unclear. When we are measuring the power of data centers, not by the actual how much compute they can do, but how much power they're consuming, like you're talking about 10 gigawatt data centers, that's a problem. That tells you something. That's a fundamental problem. But as the chips and the GPUs and everything and the technology improves, they'll become more efficient over time.

[00:46:40] You know, I mean, I feel like a lot of the GPUs that even NVIDIA is using right now is mostly almost a stopgap to get these things out to market in such vast numbers that they can meet demand, but they're not necessarily the best at what they can be. And I think as the market matures... That's absolutely true. You know, we'll get better with that stuff. Yeah, GPUs do this by brute force. They're far from the most efficient way to do this kind of compute.

[00:47:09] I mean, most of the energy is air conditioning and stuff like that. So dealing with heat is a big problem. But one of the unexpected ways, or maybe it is expected, ways that AI is increasing energy use is that people are reading about how much energy is required for these data centers and saying, you know, I used to unplug my nightlight in the middle of the night to save power for the environment. And these guys are, you know, so what the hell? I'm just going to, you know, just leave everything on all the time.

[00:47:36] Well, it was an open AI had a blog post talking about how every time someone would say thank you in a chat, it would like use like 10,000 gallons of water. It's a ridiculous number, you know? Yeah. People read that stuff and they're like, what am I doing? Why am I, you know, sorting my recycling when this is what's happening? One of the plans is to put these data centers, these AI data centers in space. This is a guy who has actually worked on this kind of thing.

[00:48:04] An article from Terranis, T-A-R-A-N-I-S. I'm not familiar with the publication, but I found this. It says, data centers in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. There's a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch satellite companies to build data centers in space, TLDR. It's not going to work. He says he's a former NASA engineer and scientist with a PhD in space electronics, worked for Google for a decade. What does he know?

[00:48:33] He's worked on the bit of the cloud at Google responsible for deploying AI capacity. So he says, I'm quite well placed to have an opinion here. There are a lot of reasons why it's a bad idea. You know, one of the things people think is, oh, well, it's really cold out there, right? Yeah, but without an atmosphere to conduct the heat away, it's actually harder to cool stuff in space. Yeah. Yeah, you don't instantly freeze in space. That is one of those movie tropes.

[00:49:03] He's designed hardware to fly in space. So I think the guy knows a little bit. He says, we designed a camera system for space. Thermal management was front and center in the design process. It had to be because power is scarce in small spacecraft. Thermal management has to be achieved. So he couldn't use heat pumps. It's basically a turn down the power use because the cooling was so difficult. There's also radiation. You got to, you know, I mean, the chips that are sent out into space are often

[00:49:33] much less sophisticated than the chips we use at home because of the cosmic rays. Yeah, well, I mean, a great example of that is what's going on right now with Airbus. A couple of days ago, they had to issue a recall for 6,000 Airbus A320s, you know, which are the most common airliner in the world now because their electronic systems on many of them had gotten corrupted by recent solar storms. Right. The software in there. They had to downgrade the software.

[00:50:02] They had to reflash these things because the, just the, and this is inside of our atmosphere where a lot of that stuff gets filtered out, you know, not out in space where there's nothing to filter it. So, you know, if we can't even protect our aircraft that are flying within our atmosphere, you know, the idea of having data centers in space, you know, that definitely seems like a bad idea. Pigs in space. All right. I want to take a little break.

[00:50:31] If we come back, I will talk about China and its AI efforts, which, I mean, I'm, you know, I don't know if you noticed this when I used Kagi. I used a Chinese model. With Kagi's assistant, you get to choose from a huge number. That's one of the reasons I like Kagi. I'm sorry. I keep giving Kagi a plug. It's not, it's not, it's not because you're here, Mike. I'm just a fan, but I have been using a GLM, which is a new model from a Chinese company

[00:50:59] that is Z.ai, which is quite good. But notice of the, of the Kagi recommended models, three out of the four are Chinese. The Chinese models are really good. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. They're also, by the way, one of the reasons Kagi likes them. They're among the least expensive models available out there. So that's good too. When you go to Klaude, it gets a little pricey. A little more expensive.

[00:51:30] You're watching This Week in Tech, Mike Yelgin, Sam Abul-Samad, and of course, from Windows Central, great Daniel Rubino. We are thrilled to have you here as well. Thank you for watching today. Our show brought to you by Deal, D-E-E-L. If this has happened to us, you know, it's hard to do HR with people out of state or out of country. It makes it hard to hire. How many times has this happened to you?

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[00:53:21] So the Chinese models are getting better and better. And even though we don't know that they are cheaper and cheaper to make, because, of course, it's coming from China, their claims are that they are not spending as much money on power, on GPUs. From the Financial Times, China leapfrogs U.S. and global market for open AI models. Oh, and that's the other thing I like about these Chinese models. They are open source. Yeah.

[00:53:47] A study by the MIT and Hugging Face found the total share of downloads of new Chinese-made open models rose to 17% in the past year, compared to 15.8% from American developers. It's the first time Chinese groups have... So Hugging Face, if you don't know, is a place you can go and download models. I use it all the time with LM Studio or, you know, llama.cpp. You can download the models and use them and run them locally.

[00:54:15] And I have to say, for the most part, I am downloading these open Chinese models. Some of the ones I just showed you in Kagi. Also, the one open AI model that is open that's very good GPT-OSS. But the Chinese models are free to download. They're free to modify. You can integrate them into your own stuff.

[00:54:37] And this is the risk, because obviously the Chinese government is interested in having control over information globally. And by open sourcing these models, making them very inexpensive. And by the way, some reports say that they can produce these models at around 30% of the price as American models. We don't know if that's true or not. But they want to have information. And they're already using this information.

[00:55:01] So, for example, there's a report that came out recently that found that the DeepSeq R1 LLM generates up to 50% more insecure code when prompted with politically sensitive inputs like Falun Gong, Uyghurs, and Tibet. In fact, it looked like it was intentionally producing insecure code for those things that were the enemy of the PRC of the Chinese government. Exactly. Well, well, well. You get what you pay for, Leo.

[00:55:31] Well, well, well. But, of course, you can download these models and get them uncensored and so forth. And I presume that that's post-training that they're doing this kind of thing. But it's a larger play, right? So, it's a long-term. The way the government thinks in China is it's a long-term, big-picture play where they get everybody using these things. They have the power to update them. The state has major input into what happens at these companies.

[00:55:57] In fact, it's Chinese law that every Chinese company has to cooperate with Chinese intelligence. Right. And for the leaders of those companies that don't comply, off to jail with, you know, join the Uyghurs in the labor camps. But so this is a long-term play. And it's a real problem for the United States because, of course, in the United States, we like big money, massive investment, expensive, you know, development of technologies.

[00:56:28] And we're at a bit of a disadvantage for the models that the world uses. Yeah. In fact, the Commerce Department has expanded its list of Chinese companies on the entity list. Some companies that we know well that are being widely used. In fact, we're watching with interest to see what happens to DJI, the makers of those incredible drones. I love those drones so much. I hope they don't get banned. I just need them.

[00:56:56] But the problem is that you just stated the problem that every Chinese company, by law, is kind of beholden to the Chinese government. So you could really say that every single product produced in China has that risk, right? Yeah. I mean, it varies according to the type of product. So, for example, routers and networking equipment. These are highly risky for, you know, and things like drones. But is it drone? Right. Kind of. I mean, could you imagine if they could throw a switch?

[00:57:25] Everything that's got connectivity is potentially at risk. Connectivity, cameras, location capabilities. Like, you know, connections to phones. There's all kinds of problems with drones, unfortunately. You know, toys and things like that. Who cares? But like, you know, these are potentially usable. I mean, there's robot dogs, right?

[00:57:45] They found back doors in Chinese robot dogs, you know, that they could just activate them remotely, theoretically, and create a robot dog army in other countries controlled by Beijing. I mean, this is also is why they don't sell a lot of those Chinese EVs to in the United States. Well, and also there's a scandal. Well, this is a scandal.

[00:58:05] So BYD, which is the biggest seller of EVs in China, is on this recently released from the Defense Department list of Chinese companies that are cooperating with or supporting the Chinese military. Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD. But Sam, everybody seems to agree that Chinese EVs are light years ahead of every other company outside of China. Is that right? Pretty much. Yeah.

[00:58:28] I mean, they have moved so far in the last five years in terms of their software capabilities, their overall cost and efficiency. They're much less expensive.

[00:59:09] They're adjusting in real time through AI. And so the people inside, it was a smooth ride for them. But the car was like going upstairs. I mean, that was like six months ago they were showing that off. Very cool stuff. But there was a scandal that started in Norway where they did tests underground where they could block all the signals and found that they were remote control capabilities in their Chinese buses that were used for public transportation. The ability to shut down the buses remotely. And so other countries like the UK started worrying about theirs.

[00:59:39] Israel has canceled all the Chinese bus contracts they had with the military. And they're looking at, you know, for domestic use. And which caused this, triggered this whole bigger thing. We're like, what else, where else do they have backdoors and kill switches and all this kind of stuff? You know, and you sound like a lunatic conspiracy theorist to suggest that the Chinese government is orchestrating this global distribution of electronic products that can be controlled remotely. But on the other hand, you're like, why is this stuff in there?

[01:00:09] To be fair, though, every company has those kinds of capabilities. GM and OnStar in 2008 launched remote shutdown capabilities in OnStar for stolen vehicles. So if you reported your car stolen, they could reach out and make the car slow down and, you know, give the location to police. If you didn't pay your monthly loan fee. Yeah, and that's not even from a manufacturer.

[01:00:35] That's, you know, used car dealers putting that, you know, disabled systems and mobilizers in their vehicles, you know, if you didn't make your loan payments. But the difference is that GM is not planning to invade Taiwan. And then they flip the switch. Thank God. That should be so bad at it. Well, we talked about this a few weeks ago. We had Alex Stamos, brilliant security researcher on Twitter. And he said, Chinese are in our grid, inextricably. Inextricably.

[01:01:02] We know they're in our telecommunications system, inextricably. They're just sitting there. Why are they there? What are they up to? They're just waiting. Self-invasion. Why are they harvesting the personal, you know, harvesting the databases of government employees that have security clearances and building these, you know, getting all this stuff for, you know, obviously, they think big picture. They love tons and tons of data. They want to be prepared for future conflicts.

[01:01:30] They kind of learned from the U.S. in the Iraq invasion. Here's my argument. I think this is defensive, not offensive. And I think the best way to handle this is to make—China already is huge financial ties to the United States just through loans. You know, they own half of New York City. That's the argument, right? The closer our economies are, the safer we are.

[01:01:51] Forward to peace is to work with them, is to cooperate with them, is to trade with them so that it's economically dependent on us not to shut down and increase the paranoia around them. It's an economic MAD. Exactly. Mutually assured destruction. That's right.

[01:02:11] The problem, though, is that under President Xi, over the last decade—I think it started in 2015—they started a policy of not so much decoupling from the West, but making the local Chinese economy less dependent on the West. Again, defensively. I would do that if I were them, too. Yeah. Wouldn't you? But, you know, so, you know, they've encouraged people to buy Chinese brand products instead of Western brand products.

[01:02:40] And, you know, this is part of the reason why, for example, you've seen this shift in the Chinese auto industry where it's gone from two-thirds of all Chinese—all vehicles sold in China were Western brands. Even if they were built in China, they were brands like Volkswagen and General Motors and BMW. Yeah. Are we doing exactly the same thing? We are doing the same thing. And it's flipped. And now it's— I think that's a mistake. — almost 70 percent. Yeah. I think the less dependent we are on one another, the riskier our relationships are. Yes. No, absolutely. Yeah. That's a different question.

[01:03:11] China, by the way, you know, we opened up—Trump, because Jensen Wong probably gave him a million bucks or whatever, said, okay, yeah, you go ahead, sell those NVIDIA chips to China. Yeah, but now they don't want them. But China's saying— Because the Chinese government is telling Chinese AI companies— You keep your stupid chips. Yeah, don't use the NVIDIA chips. Use other alternatives. Huawei is developing very, very good chips that they hope will compete. That's, to me, smart policy.

[01:03:36] I mean, look, there's a lot of things wrong about the PRC. A lot of things wrong with the Chinese government. I'm just mostly interested in preserving relations with them as opposed to going to war with them. I agree with your—the idea that they're defensive, too. China doesn't have a history of aggression like, say, Russia and the Soviet Union does. They're definitely interested in protecting their borders. They're definitely interested in—

[01:04:05] Well, to be fair, they have a history of aggression in World War II era. Right, yeah. Where they pretty much conquered Southeast Asia and Japan. But now they see themselves more as economic. China, at that point in World War II, prior to the war, had been occupied by the Japanese. It was vice versa, yeah. So the history of China has not always been isolationist. No, no, a long time ago. But now they see themselves more as economic power as a way to— Exactly, with the Belt and Road Initiative.

[01:04:31] So I don't really fear this idea of China wanting to invade and expand their empire kind of thing. They see it more as an economic— I just want to buy a BYDEV. I know, I do, too. You think that's silly, Sam? No, it's not at all. I mean, they make very good cars. If you go to Mexico, you can buy one. Aren't they about to cancel the Ford Lightning? Probably, yes. What? I know they suspended production.

[01:05:02] Yeah, they're probably going to discontinue it because it has not met up to the overly inflated sales expectations that they had a few years ago. Well, they had the F-150, the best-selling vehicle in America, right? Well, no, actually— Best-selling truck. The F-Series as a whole, including the heavy-duty models, is the best-selling overall. But the individual best-selling nameplate is actually the Toyota RAV4. Oh, interesting. It outsells the F-150.

[01:05:31] So, but the F-Series trucks are very successful. And so Ford probably thought, maybe if we make an electric version of this, especially one that you could power your home with in a blackout. Well, and they did— But it was very expensive. I think it was priced, right? Yeah. Well, there was a bunch of factors. And towing issues. Yeah, when they initially launched it, you know, they had it priced at a base price of $40,000.

[01:05:55] The problem is when they launched it in early 2022, you know, that was followed within a few months by the invasion of Ukraine, which then sent certain commodity prices like nickel and a few other metals skyrocketing, which caused battery prices to skyrocket as a result. And so they had to raise the prices on that vehicle. And at the same time, you know, Ford had made some planning mistakes.

[01:06:20] They put in way too much—they grew the capacity way too much, you know, because when they originally were developing the Lightning, they were planning on selling about $25,000 a year. By the time it started production, they had increased that to $50,000 a year. And then a couple of months later, they raised that to $80,000. And then they doubled the size of the factory and raised it to $150,000. The problem is last year was their best sales year for the Lightning, and they sold about 33,000 units. Yeah.

[01:06:47] And so when you're running at about 20% of your capacity, of your production capacity, you lose a lot of money. Is that why really we're blocking Chinese car sales in the U.S.? It's protectionism. That is a big part of it, is protectionism. Because right— They crush us, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, the problem is, you know, the Chinese, by taking control of a lot of the supply chain for key materials,

[01:07:15] you know, like lithium processing, graphite processing, a lot of the rare earth metal processing, you know, they've cornered a lot of that market. And so, you know, they control to a large degree the pricing on those materials. And so that gives them an advantage that we cannot compete with until we build up our own independent supply chain of those materials. But here's a question for you.

[01:07:42] So it seems to me that if you balance different interests, you might consider the idea of just opening the gates to Chinese electric vehicles, letting them flood the U.S. market. If they're half the price for consumers, everybody's going to buy them. And what would that do to the quality of our air? And the number of, you know, the longevity of people? But what would it do to auto workers in Detroit?

[01:08:09] It would absolutely have environmental benefits for the United States. The problem is that we also have an administration that doesn't care. They don't care. In fact, they are openly antagonistic to any idea of improving the environment. At the COP meetings, they didn't say anything about fossil fuel reduction. But I'm not talking about what's the right thing to do. Is it to protect the industry or is it to protect the air?

[01:08:35] Yeah, should the American, does the American auto industry deserve to be protected? I guess is the question. Is it more important than health? Right. Is the question. You know, the thing is, you know, if we lose all that employment in the United States, all that manufacturing employment, who's going to be able to afford to buy those cars? Even if they're cheap, who's going to have the income to buy those vehicles, even at half the price of the U.S.-built models?

[01:09:02] Which is why none of these car companies are looking at robotic production or reducing the number of workers on the line because they know that, no, that's not true. I just wonder, what percentage of a car comes from China anyway? Some. For the most part, it's actually not that big. It's probably less than about 10 or 15 percent in most cases.

[01:09:29] And these are these are this is kind of a bastion of American industrial jobs, right? This is this is yeah, there's there's about there's about three million direct jobs in the auto industry in the United States. But the thing is, those three million jobs also support about about seven or eight times that many. So about 20 to 25 million jobs in other other businesses.

[01:09:55] You know, those those people that work for automakers and suppliers, you know, down down the value chain. You know, those people are spending money in other businesses around. So what you got to do then is you just open up BID factories, right? I mean, Honda did this. Toyota does that. That's true. Yeah. I just find this whole discussion funny just because, you know, growing up, I did political science and economics. It's just like I remember the free market and it was just what the chips land where they may.

[01:10:25] You got to really compete. And then in the real world. Are you a keynesian guy? Well, I try to be a consistent person. So if I want to articulate the market principles. I think this is the single biggest problem we have in the United States is it's not consistent. Every four to eight years, we completely flip. Yeah. And do something different. So no one knows what we're going to do. This is uncomfortable. We don't. It's politically unpopular. And it's just like what happened to free market, man? Like I thought that's all that matters.

[01:10:55] Trust Noen in our in our discord says we've been trying to build a relationship with China since Nixon. They've taken the opportunity to pillage everything they can get their hands on. It's like trying to build a relationship with a crackhead who keeps robbing your house. They figured it out because there's the other thing, too. So see, economics, you open up their markets and then they'll magically convert to democracy. Although this policy apparently could never apply to Cuba. Cuba was too radical and too big. Yeah.

[01:11:22] You know, China instead was just like, we'll keep the authoritarianism and have the capitalism. Yeah. They pick the cherry pick the pieces that they wanted. And they're making it work. I mean, yeah. And everything is. Look, there are problems with every single form of government. The real problem is you said it earlier. Humans. Yes. Yeah. We are the fundamental problem. We're the problem. Yeah. So we've got to get AI. The thing. Maybe that's why we need AI.

[01:11:52] Somebody needs to run this. The thing about China, you know, the probably the best example of what has happened in China is that book, Apple in China. You know, and that book talks about. Yeah. It talks about how, you know, the Chinese circulated workers through the various Foxconn and Apple facilities in China and their supplier, their supply chain to learn how to build stuff and how to design stuff.

[01:12:16] And then those people went off and formed competitors like Xiaomi and Huawei and so many others. And, you know, that's just in one industry. They've done that across the entire spectrum. They've done that in the auto industry. They've done it in every industry they compete in. Isn't that what the free market's supposed to celebrate is competition? Well, the problem, the problem, the fundamental problem with the free market argument, you know, if you go back to Adam Smith, you know, is, you know, there's there's this idea

[01:12:45] of, you know, if you have enough buyers and sellers, you know, then you reach an equilibrium and, you know, everybody has to be informed. And, you know, if you have a sufficient level of competition on both sides of that equation, you know, then you can you can have a free market. But over the last 150 years, the global economy has shifted and it's grown.

[01:13:09] You know, the number of sellers has shrunk so dramatically in so many areas that we don't really have the pieces in place that we need to actually have that kind of free market. So because because we've allowed that level of consolidation, we have to we have to manage it. You know, otherwise, you know, the small number of players on one side of that equation,

[01:13:33] the small number of sellers relative to the number of buyers limits the ability to actually have real competition. Well, and there's a larger capitalism, which is you basically end up creating an oligarchy because we have made it legal, which is what we've done. Super rich to that's the irony of that's the irony of capitalism. It everybody talks about competition, but it fundamentally hates competition.

[01:13:58] Well, but but but also, I mean, we've in the last time, but but but basically there's a difference between meddling in with the with the market and taxing the rich. Like if we had a if we have like a negative income tax proposed by some economics, economists like 40, 50 years ago, where the more money you're greater your net worth, the higher the percentage of your tax rate. We did that sort of thing. OK, we would we'd we'd be in a much better position.

[01:14:27] And that's not meddling with the market. That's just redistributing wealth. Yeah, basically. And, you know, when I said, you know, managing that that economic equation, you know, that that that balance, you know, I wasn't necessarily advocating anything specific, but I agree with you, Mike, that, you know, when when you have too much of that influence on one side or the other, you know, then you need to start managing that somehow. And taxation is, I think, a very effective way of doing that. Yeah.

[01:14:58] Capitalism is indispensable. What we have is a rotten political system. The most successful countries in the world with the best environmental records, with the most humane societies are capitalist countries. Right. And some of the worst are capitalist countries as well as our politics we need to fix. Yeah. On that note, let's pause. Let you let you absorb all of this great information. Were you all poli sci majors? Because it feels I was I was an engineer. I was.

[01:15:27] OK, two out of three. And I was a Chinese major. So there I took one economics class. I always thought economics was fun. But the problem was that we study microeconomics or is it macro? We study economics, but it's not but it's in a test tube. And so it's not quite it's much more complex and chaotic than what we study. It's a dismal science. All systems are. I did work in the Brookings Economics Library as one of my jobs in college.

[01:15:56] Talk about dismal. That was a very dismal library. I always thought that this is the dismal science. I get it now. We will have more with a great panel. Mike Elgin, Samable, Samad. Great to have you. And of course, Daniel Rubino from Windows Central. Our show today brought to you by Zapier. I love Zapier. I use Zapier every single day. But the beauty of Zapier is it automates the work.

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[01:19:18] Casey Newton, who left mainstream media to create a, I think, very successful newsletter called Platformer. He really made his name when Elon Musk bought Twitter a few years ago. But he still does some great stuff. This is a piece that he just published. Roblox is a problem, but it's a symptom of something worse. What is the role of tech journalism

[01:19:44] in a world where CEOs no longer feel shame? And by the way, it's not just CEOs. It's politicians. It's everybody in the public eye. Shame seems to be in shortage all over. He says, he uses Roblox as the example. Roblox, of course, 151 million monthly users, most of them underage. A lot of people very concerned about the predators on Roblox.

[01:20:13] And Roblox has had a kind of successful, success of chain of failures with child safety. Casey says, on Friday, the Hard Fork team published our interview with Roblox CEO. In the days since, it's the most discussed interview we've done in three years. Journalists described the interview as bizarre, unhinged, and a car crash. That was because Roblox CEO, David Bazzucchi,

[01:20:44] basically had a dismissive attitude towards child safety. Casey says, this unfortunately struck me as familiar, that lately tech CEOs have basically just thrown up their hands and said, hey, this is just the way it is. How long are you guys going to be going on about all this? A lack of shame makes it hard for journalists, tech journalists in particular,

[01:21:14] to do our job. You guys agree? I wonder what started that era, the lack of shame for doing stuff for us. You agree that this is the era we're in, though, right? Oh, 100%. Mark Zuckerberg started it, I think, because part of it is because media turned these guys into rock stars. Bingo. You know, and so they, they, they, you know, we treated them like gods, and so they're going to act like it. Over and over again, Casey writes,

[01:21:43] we've seen leaders in Bazooki's position choose growth over guardrails, right? Mm-hmm. And when we journalists ask, why are so many of their users suffering, executives laugh and tell us, we're the crazy ones. Look at TikTok. Look at Meta. And I, I really do think Mark Zuckerberg started this by, you know, break things, apologize later. You know, don't, don't ask for permission. Just do it. And then say, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. And,

[01:22:12] and we let them get away with it again and again and again. And eventually they just stop, you know, saying we didn't mean to do that. Yeah. The lesson learned was there's no, there's no consequence. Well, there is a consequence and it's reward. So the incentives are all messed up. Yeah. No negative consequences. We live in a world where, where politicians and business tycoons are rewarded for shameless grifting, for ignoring the needs of children. In this case,

[01:22:41] he's basically knowingly, and this is right out of the Meta playbook, exposing children to harm for the money. And he thinks that because there's so much money to be made, that's a reason why it's okay. That's the world we're living in, in terms of our incentives. We need to change the incentives so that the incentive is to protect children. If you have a responsibility, if you have a children's platform, essentially,

[01:23:07] and we need to apply similar standards that we would apply to the real world, just because it's digital and online doesn't mean that there are no rules. Imagine if Chuck E. Cheese had a policy where they were encouraging adults to come in and have like private rooms where they could be alone with kids. What would we think? What would we do about that? Right. We would do something about it, but if it's online, well, it's okay. Cause it's online. No, I think, I don't think it should be okay.

[01:23:34] And I think the incentives should be aligned with what the public wants, which is, you know, protection for kids. They're writing the cover from the blowback with Twitter and this idea of like regulation and, and people enforcing policies on platforms. And so while Roblox wasn't directly a part of that, that's the like mood of the, the atmosphere right now that we're in, which is that, Oh, you don't touch companies. You let them do whatever they want,

[01:24:03] whatever the repercussions may be. And we don't put laws into place. Um, and so, you know, it's fine though, going back to the, uh, the era of, you know, do whatever you want and not be apologetic. I, there's a good documentary on Netflix about Rob Ford up in Canada. Yeah. Uh, and cocaine issues, didn't he? Yeah. He was, as far as I could tell the first real person in, in pop culture media that did something wrong and didn't apologize for it. Just like, yeah,

[01:24:32] that's who I am or video would come out. And he was like, that's not me. That's a lie. And all this. And it literally set the blueprint for Trump and everybody else to come along and just be like, no, you're wrong. Prove it. That's not me. And all this it's, but that's just a side thing I've noticed. But, uh, that's the era we live in now, you know, you know, brother is down the premier of Ontario. I know. Isn't that ironic? Yeah. Uh, the interesting thing is, I mean, this is what the tobacco companies did for years, right? They said, Oh no, there's nothing wrong with.

[01:25:01] They knew they had all the evidence that cigarettes caused cancer. They denied it. They deflected it. They delayed it. And they, but they didn't get away with it because the press and Congress persisted and finally brought them down. And this is what the Democrats are hoping for the midterms to bring this issue to light. Because in fact, this divides the Republican party. There are the, you know, pro Trump folks who are like, yeah, just let, let everybody, you know, let the business do what they want.

[01:25:30] But there are a whole bunch of Republicans who were like, no, no, no, We want strong, you know, protections and guardrails. This is why you see those weird schisms, these dichotomies with Marjorie Taylor green and Steve Bannon, who you think are like total mega supporters suddenly being, you know, apostate to the religion. It's like, what's going on? And all the people who are against the Epstein stuff and want those files. Epstein was the beginning, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

[01:25:59] Those people should also be outraged, outraged about what's going on for Roblox and these online companies. Epstein would have loved Roblox. It would have been his favorite platform. Do we know that he didn't invest? That's not true. Is it? No, you're just, that's a joke. I hope. Yes. A dark one, but you know, dark joke. Yes. So, so Sarah Wynn Williams, who's a former senior policy advisor at Meta, wrote a book about Facebook and about their whole attitude. And it's called,

[01:26:28] careless people. Right. And so, so we, we, we incentivize the careless people. I do disagree with sort of part of the tone of, of, of Casey's article. I mean, it's a great article. Everyone should read it. I really respect him. And so I'm not dissing him, but I do think that he is calling attention to the problem by making it seem like it's very widespread. Actually, Meta and Roblox are among the worst, uh,

[01:27:00] uh, guiltiest parties in this world. I don't think they're typical. I don't think Meta is typical amongst, among social networking platforms. I don't think Roblox is typical. There's way too much of it to be sure. And I think that's a big part of this point, but they're the worst. I mean, Meta is the worst. There's a, he has decades long history at Meta of them doing research, finding out that their product does harm,

[01:27:24] and then explicitly and deliberately choosing to do nothing about it because there's more money to be made and doing nothing. Yeah. I mean, there's evidence galore that they knew and did nothing. This reminds me of the tobacco companies. Yes. Do you think, I mean, it took decades before the tobacco companies finally got kind of brought. And by the way, it's still completely legal to smoke cigarettes. So maybe they haven't been brought to their knees.

[01:27:52] Do you think that there will be a comeuppance that at some point Meta and Roblox and companies like that will have to. I do. And I think, I think it's music. Yeah. I think, I think the, I think the, the political actors who are defending the Roblox is in the Metas of the world are going to get their asses handed to them. And I think that that will cause, that will trigger a congressional, because that's what we need is Congress to actually show up and do their jobs. Well, somebody else says we need the,

[01:28:21] a federal trade commission that actually is empowered to do its job. And even when they try to do their job, you know, they, they haven't been successful. I mean, look at the, the ruling on Meta just a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, they're basically, the court said, yeah, it's over. You know, they, they, you know, they've tried and just haven't been very effective. So, you know, even when we had Lena Khan, you know, she didn't really achieve anything. Yeah.

[01:28:51] That was her action against Meta, which the court just said, yeah, you didn't prove your case. So we're dismissing it. You, we have to remember and look at the big picture and remember that the current political era is a personally, you know, it's a one person sort of a movement. And when that one person exits the stage, the movement is essentially going to, at the very least change very radically. I think within a decade,

[01:29:20] we'll be back to a somewhat more normal politics where, where we'll be able to regulate these things where states will have more rights. And, and you can see, you know, a combination of Europe and California. I hope you're right. And New York. Yeah. I'm, unfortunately, I'm not as confident as you, Mike, you know, because, you know, you look at what, you know, okay, what happens after this guy's gone, you know, then you've got, you've got the, you know,

[01:29:49] the tech oligarchs, you know, that are, that's to me, funding and controlling everybody behind him. It's about the power we've reached. I wonder if we've reached a critical mass where these companies are so big, so rich, so powerful that nobody can stop them. Well, a big part of their power particular leader right now is being given to them by the administration. And the, the administration has the power that it has because of the number of voters who

[01:30:17] are personally loyal to that individual person. When that, when that is broken, then we're, it's a different ball game. Yeah. They have way too much power and so on, but right now that's being put on steroids by the administration, which is problematic because there is going to be a point where it doesn't matter. By the time he's gone, you can't fight. We have so much, you know, this go, going back to the whole AI thing, you know,

[01:30:46] we've got so much slop being generated by AI that, you know, even now, I mean, nobody knows what's true or false anymore. Right. But the, the thing that I always like to go back to in my writing of opinion columns is that we always forget that the more extreme things get in any direction, the more the react extreme will be the reaction. Right. And so there's a lot of disgust around AI slop. For example,

[01:31:14] it's somewhere between 70 and 90% by the, by the end of this year, right? Next month. And within three, four, five, six years, people, some are predicting 99% of the content online will be AI generated. Okay. That's not just this one way street, this one way trend. There'll be a whole body reaction to this that won't be positive. Uh, it's already happening of course. And little,

[01:31:44] one by one companies are starting to build in tools to be able to turn off AI, to be able to reject it. This is the problem with flooding the world. Like look at the podcast industry. There are podcast companies. So quote unquote podcast companies that create 5,000 shows, right? It's just garbage, right? AI with AI. Exactly. They just, it's on autopilot takes, it costs them $3 per episode. Can you imagine Leo? But they don't have to make much to pay for that.

[01:32:13] One ad and you're done. Right. But, but what, what is the, what is the right policy for a podcast app? The right policy is give the people what they want and let them turn this garbage off. Look what's happening to Spotify. Lisa, uh, who was it? Was it Lisa had a Uber driver that said, yeah, this is just a sideline. What I've been doing lately is using AI to create. I do an album a week of AI music, which I post and I make right now a few hundred dollars, but if one of them hits,

[01:32:43] I won't have to drive anymore. He is single handedly publishing hundreds of albums a year of AI music on Spotify. Spotify. And I think that there's probably thousands of people like, well, even, even Spotify is, is probably is. Spotify's doing it themselves. That's right. Much of it. So they don't have to pay anybody for it. They can prioritize that stuff in playlists that they generate. So they don't have to pay anybody else. It's good.

[01:33:12] Benito's on vacation. Cause I think he'd be pretty upset right now. As a musician, he hates a Suno. I think Suno is pretty amazing. Amazing. They just, by the way, made a deal with Warner music. For AI music. The good news is, sorry, just like, you know, what everybody's saying here with Mike, especially there, I think could be definitely a pushback against this.

[01:33:37] And this is the one nice thing about open and free markets is a company can come along, create another music or podcast platform, specifically ban AI stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And that's their marketing, right? This is pure music. This is original. And it would attract a market just like how vinyl made a huge comeback, right? Because people got sick of the whole digital experience and they're like wanting more authentic and vinyl still does really well,

[01:34:07] especially for collectors. So there's opportunities here to sort of really push back against this. So even with the social network stuff, which finally seems to be, I believe is one of the first years where Twitter and Facebook and all that are starting to slowly drop in numbers, but there could be opportunities here to create another platform. That is what people want to where they want to be versus what has been forced down their throats. And everybody thinks it is because all this stuff was great years ago. Now it's just like horrible.

[01:34:36] My kid says that he knows a lot of gamers who say, we'll never play a game with AI in it. Right. But Tim, but Tim Sweeney says, yeah, go ahead. Because guess what? Every game will have AI in it. Pretty soon they'll all be AI. It doesn't matter what you say today. It's happening. I mean, every game for, I don't know how long has had non-player characters. Right. It may not be. Well, imagine how good they'll be. They won't. It may not have been created by,

[01:35:05] you know, current types of generative AI, but it was, it was done procedurally. How many times did you hear that guy say, yeah, I was, I used to be a fighter, but then I got an arrow through the knee over and over and over again. Now there'll be unique, interesting, vibrant stories coming from your NBC. This comes down to transparency. I think gamers will be okay with some amount of AI, but the companies just need to be forthright about how they're using it. Hollywood was very,

[01:35:33] it was up in arms over what was the name of the movie about the architect? That they used AI to fix their Hungarian access. The most minor use of AI ever. And as a result, even though it was nominated for an Academy award, it didn't win. I think it didn't win because Hollywood said, no, no, we got to punish these guys. Cause it was, I think that stuff will be normal though. Stuff like that, I think is fine, but it's going to get a lot. These problems are going to get a lot more difficult. Like I said,

[01:36:02] when AI writes the first Academy award winning script and it can make its own movies and all this kind of stuff and people can't tell a difference, then the real moral quandaries. what are the biggest movies? And I think we're getting very close to that, by the way. I think we're inches away from that. What are the biggest movies in the last three, three years, right? It's Maverick, you know, Top Gun Maverick. Yeah. And F1. And the reason everybody loves them is they put, they, they lashed actors into real jets and real cars and they hit the gas and

[01:36:32] everybody loved it because it was real. Interesting. There's always a lot of good YouTube analysis right now talking about cinematography, how much it's changed in the last 10 years. There's a video going on right now about, they call it the Netflix lighting about how there's no shadows anymore in the way they shoot stuff. And it has this fakeness to it that doesn't, it's fascinating stuff because in this, you know, desire to make mass media and make it as much as possible, it's also become very generic. And so,

[01:37:02] yeah, Mike's right. Like people want to see, you see it all the time with special effects discussions where people miss, even movies from the eighties where they use practical effects. There's something that people enjoy a lot. We're always going to be able to tell the difference that we'll like be able to distinguish. It does become that. I wonder. you know, would you hit, you hit the nail on the head. There are two arguments. One is, you know, librarians in Michigan are banning all AI books and libraries because the, the,

[01:37:31] the AI books tend to be garbage. What happens when they're wonderful and fantastic, right? So that's another issue. But the second thing is that will it matter to people whether they're being communicated with and sharing the experiences of another human being, or will it not matter? Would they just want to be plugged in the matrix and just receive stuff coming from the machine? I tend to think that once we're super, when we,

[01:37:57] once we stop being dazzled by the incredible advancements that are being made every day in AI. And, and this happens very quickly, by the way, remember when nano banana came out, it was like three days where everybody's like, wow, this is like, everything's different. And now we're just kind of like, yeah, whatever. Once we're stopping dazzled by these things, we're going to kind of want something real. We're going to want something that comes from another person. We're going to want to, we're going to remember that content is basically writing and photography and, and movie making and all these things,

[01:38:25] which exist for people to share their experiences. I'd like to think that you're right, Mike, but, you know, then when you look at, you know, how many of the, you know, bestselling books, you know, bestselling novels, you know, are basically dreck, you know, already. Yeah. Danielle Steele could be, it could be better than a romance novel you talked about. You know, the, the, the, what's the vampire series? Yeah.

[01:38:56] Twilight. Yeah. And, you know, Danielle Steele and, you know, so many of the, you know, Daniel, the Da Vinci code, you know, stuff, you know, a lot of this, you know, these are all written by human beings. Yeah. It's not exactly, you know, great literature. Yeah. Of course, it's as soon as people are going to read in the future. Yeah. You know, people are, people are willing to absorb a lot of not great stuff anyway. So I don't know that, you know, yeah. I mean,

[01:39:25] I, I, I definitely would prefer that, you know, to have, you know, real experience, you know, to share and real human experience. But I think most people don't really. It may be a luxury for the rich and the well-educated. I mean, there's so many things are like that. For example, we, we replaced horses with cars and replaced, you know, sailboats with power boats, but actually if you're rich, you have a horse and a sailboat, right? So in a fireplace, we have central heating now, but you know, there's talk that that's what's happening with college.

[01:39:55] That college is going to be just for rich people as almost as a luxury to get that extra education to be worldly. Well, for normal people, there's not going to be any financial benefit. I think it's always been that. So ladies and gentlemen, if you like good literature, make sure you're rich. I don't know. I managed to turn a political science degree into something else. It was your connections, man. Where'd you go to school? Siena. No, that wasn't your connections. Okay. No.

[01:40:23] My sister went to Worcester college. Worcester. Worcester college. California girl. Yeah. It was just down the road from PC and URI. I had a friend who always was very proud of his degree from URI. The university was my second, my, my second school is going to my backup. PC. Good school. Good basketball power. Let's take a break. We're talking with a Siena graduate. Daniel, Daniel Rubino. I'm sorry. See, it was good school. I'm not knocking Siena. I'm not knocking Siena. Siena,

[01:40:53] New York times poll. That's the one of the most famous polls out there. That's right. That's what we said. It's the same Siena. That's Siena. Yeah. That's Siena. Yeah. There you go. It's a very famous political science. Well, it's the place for poli sci. Yep. Okay. Now we're talking Sam, but we'll Sam, but where'd you get your engineering degree? When I was there, it was known as the GMI engineering and management Institute. Now it's known as Kettering university. Kettering in Flint. Okay, cool. Another well-known name. Mm-hmm. Sloan Kettering. Yeah.

[01:41:23] Uh, and Mike Yelkin. UCLA, UCLA, UCLA, baby from, from, for a twit audience. I think the most important thing about UCLA was it's the place where the world's first email was received. And in fact, I remember the room we'd walk by and it's like, Oh, that's the room where the email first email, they typed one word and the whole thing crashed. That's where the at sign was invented. Exactly. Yeah. Actually, pastel was at USC. So nevermind. Oh yeah. This bastard. UCLA, baby. Uh, we're gonna take a break. Come back with more,

[01:41:52] lots more to talk about with our great panel. Uh, but our show today brought to you by Melissa, one of our favorite sponsors, many years, many, many years. We've been telling you about the trusted data quality expert. They've been doing it longer than we have though, since 1985. And they've got lots of plaudits and kudos recognized by G2, for instance, as leaders in both data quality suite and global address verification.

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[01:45:10] Let me go over to our rundown here. Oh, I did want to talk about this. Bleeping computer had a kind of a scoop looking at the code in, uh, open AI's chat GPT, Android bot. Uh, actually, this is from an X post by somebody named Tybor. There are now references to an ad feature in chat GPT, including something called bizarre, B-A-Z-A-A-R content wrapper,

[01:45:39] search ads, and a search ad carousel. Now, you know, we've seen this kind of stuff in source code. It doesn't mean necessarily they're going to roll it out, but it kind of implies that maybe chat GPT is looking at putting ads into their results. What do you think? I mean, this is an inevitability that given the costs of, of doing this stuff. It's going to happen for sure. They know more about you than Google does.

[01:46:08] And it's going to be, it's going to be loaded with ads. Yeah. Right. We survive. I mean, I don't use Google for that reason. I use Kagi, but like I pay, I pay the price for that. That's a luxury. I'm a privileged, you know, person. And you know, the, the cost of running these data centers, running, you know, running these AI systems is just too high. You're not, you're, you're not going to be able to get enough people to pay, uh, the way you do Leo for, for all of these services. Of course not. I mean,

[01:46:38] 25 bucks a month for ad free searches. Yeah. You're not, you're not going to get enough customers or all of this stuff. You're going to have to generate revenues elsewhere, just as we've seen in media streaming and TV streaming. You know, they, you know, once they started doing ad based services at a lower cost, you know, now they generate more revenue. They, or they have higher profit margins. They have higher margins from their ad based services than they do from the customers that are paying, uh, for the ad free services.

[01:47:08] Uh, I don't, I don't think it's that simple though, because just because they have to pay back their investors and, and pay for their expensive, uh, data processing and so on doesn't mean that we have to pay them for the services. We can go elsewhere. We're talking about Chinese open source models that are far cheaper. Uh, there are going to be models that are free. I think they're going to have a hard time raising the money they need to raise. It's not automatic. They're going to have to really work at it and be very, uh,

[01:47:34] very clever to come up with monetization schemes that don't, you know, sort of turn everybody away. But even those cheaper Chinese models, you know, they've got to generate some revenue somewhere and, you know, they, they can't afford to just give away, you know, open source models forever. Uh, at some point they're going to have to get some revenues to pay. Even, even at their lower costs, they're still going to have to pay their pay off those costs at some point.

[01:48:01] I also wonder to what extent the public will continue to go open their browser, open a web app to use chat bots. When, you know, if, if smart glasses become much more ubiquitous, if watches that, uh, give you information, this kind of information, other wearables, uh, if that might, uh, sort of divert how we use these models and if the cost of using them might be built in. I mean, I,

[01:48:29] I really don't know if you're using like Ray-Ban meta glasses, uh, and you figure, you're trying to figure out how, when you're just talking to a voice, how you monetize that, uh, with advertising. That's, that's a, that's a tricky, uh, yeah. You don't want it to be stuck in the results. Right? Yeah. So, you know, if I'm looking for sneakers, you don't want the results to be tainted by an ad like it is at Amazon or Google or anywhere else. Nevermind. Forget. I,

[01:49:00] I don't mind ads as long as they're clearly posted as ads. Right. Yeah. That's just so much money to be raised to pay for this stuff. It's just, well, one of the things, open AI spending money on $3 billion is, uh, this partnership with, uh, Johnny Ive to make some, uh, thing, uh, bringing back the, uh, the buttonless iPod shuffle. Yeah. Who knows? Right. Round it with rounded edges. Now,

[01:49:29] Johnny Ive and Sam Altman on stage with, uh, Steve jobs, widow, actually, Laureen Powell jobs at the Emerson collective demo day, talked a little bit about this device. They say, Oh, it's, it's no more than two years off. Uh, they didn't really say what the device is, but, uh, but Sam Altman said, I'm sorry, Johnny Ive said, I love solutions that teeter on appearing almost naive in their simplicity.

[01:49:57] I also love incredibly intelligent, sophisticated products that you want to touch and you feel, no intimidation. And you want to use almost carelessly that you use them almost without thought that they're just tools. Sam Altman said he wants it so good. You could eat it. You want to eat it? It's the buttonless iPod shuffle. I'm telling you. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the thing that concerns me here, I mean, Johnny Ive is happy to,

[01:50:24] to take $6.5 billion for six company IO. Oh, wow. And, and, you know, yes, I would take that as well. Uh, but the problem is that at Apple, where of course Johnny Ive did his best work, he had this sensibility, the kinds of things he's saying about this, uh, secret product are the kinds of things he would say about Apple. But at Apple, there were all these engineers and visionaries and Steve jobs himself saying, okay,

[01:50:52] we're going to do this iPhone and it's going to do this. It's going to do that. And, and Johnny Ive came in to sort of do the certain fit and finish type stuff and make some, he had to make a handle on the built by the engineers that Steve jobs wouldn't go. That's crap. Right. But, but, but now he's to open AI, which has no experience in building a consumer electronics. They're saying, Hey, Johnny Ive, you're the hard way guy builds the next iPhone. And he's, he's not, that's not what he did.

[01:51:18] We saw how that played out when he didn't have that editor and Steve jobs at Apple. You know, you ended up right. Butterfly keyboards and all kinds of other nonsense. I also believe there, there's a, there's a delusion that you can do wearables, AI wearables that are not watches or glasses. And I don't believe it. Nobody's going to something. Nobody's going to lash something around their neck that those, those four factors are never going to happen. It's just another, we got enough stuff to charge.

[01:51:47] Or also, you know, this point about like no one to go and say, I'm going to make the next iPhone. Like anytime you go into a problem saying, that's what we're going to do. We're going to create the next big thing. That's like, you're already attacking it from the wrong way. You should be asking like, you know, what problem are we trying to solve with this? Or what opportunity is there that we can leverage? And right now, I mean, listen,

[01:52:16] maybe they'll create something that will just totally blow our minds. I'm open to the idea. But yeah, the idea of like a pendant or something else I got to put on, something else I got to charge. And then, and things with microphones, it's going to be listening to me. Yeah. Maybe it doesn't have a display. I definitely don't want to be talking to everything. Yeah. Right. Using a voice interface for every interaction. Right. If they want to knock it out of the park, the designer types like Johnny Ives should be working on fashion.

[01:52:45] So what we need are glasses that have a little display that you, that can look at hand gestures and things like that. So it's not all. Is that the meta display band display? I mean, that's pretty close to what it is. Pretty close to it. But the problem is nobody's can, nobody, nobody except geeks like me would wear that thing. Right. So, so what they, what they should be pouring all their energy behind is creating a line of, of, of a, of 200 different styles of glasses.

[01:53:13] This is a huge opportunity for designers, right? Cause now they're into high fashion at high prices, uh, with high tech, right? That's the opportunity. It's going to be glasses. Don't try to invent something else. It's going to be glasses. And that's why Apple, the easiest thing, the wrong angle with the division pro. It was like, well, even Apple, even Apple says, you know, maybe we'll do glasses. They're coming out with glasses eventually, but there'll be really late to market with, with open AI. Just give me open AI and glasses.

[01:53:43] And they, they would, they would immediately have a successful product. You turn me on. If the glasses were wearable. You turn me on Mike to the meta Ray bands. You've been a fan of those. Yeah. If they can do better than, than Ray band with glasses, that that's a win. Yeah. there you go. The problem with these is it's meta and I don't, and I feel like I'm giving that. Exactly. It's like, right. No one wants meta. I'm just, that's why I won't buy them. Right. Right. Yeah. But is open AI better? Or I mean, how,

[01:54:11] how do we know they're not going to be exactly the same? Well, I mean, competition though, right? Just every company. I would, I mean, maybe that's foolish, but of all the companies that could do this, Apple seems the least likely to, to misuse my information. Uh, right. But, and they're also in a good position. They're very design centric. They're very, you know, fashionable. They know how to make hardware. They know how to make products. Look at what they did with watch bands.

[01:54:40] Watch bands are the most boring thing you can imagine. And, but they went crazy with it and said, you can have this one, you can have that one. Here's a $2,000 one. They should do that with glasses. And I think they'd have a hit on their hands. It's anything that is AI that you can wear all day and look good doing it is going to be a successful. And you think the interface will be voice. I think the main interface will be voice, but also hand gestures. Right. Some of the things they're doing vision pro, right.

[01:55:10] Can be eventually built into glasses that can be worn all day. But some of the, some of the voice input can be offloaded to a visual screen. And some of the voice output can be, you know, hand gestures, right. Even with the medical glasses. Now you could say, what am I looking at? And the meta AI will do its best. And in many cases, it's pretty good at describing what you're looking at or translating. Exactly. I think, I think we're very close, but, but if you sort of like go down the dark alley of some wearable that isn't

[01:55:40] glasses or a watch, then it's just a wasted opportunity. I was wearing, as many know, if you know, I was wearing for a long time, a variety of different pendants. That were recording everything that would happen. It would give me AI synopses of the day and to do lists and stuff. And I found it actually somewhat useful, but I also found that people were a little skittish when they found out I was wearing that. I think they'd even be more skittish if they saw me wearing glasses with a

[01:56:07] tally light blinking as I was recording the scenario or talking to, or talking back to me. People are a little concerned about privacy. Yep. I think there's a huge opportunity for privacy based AI. So yeah, AI glasses are going to be huge. People will be seriously annoyed by the cameras and the recording. And so, so whoever comes out with a really compelling, good looking pair of glasses that give you the AI interaction without the camera, people is going to, and you know,

[01:56:36] always the opportunity to see opportunities. There's the anti AI type market where, and there are now glasses, right? That you wear that fool or supposed to be able to block facial recognition systems. Right. Right. So there's that alternate, you know, you can hack it from another problem, but there's a lot of potential innovation there too, that I think people are going to be interested in because yeah, you know, guarantee your own privacy. Right. There's a mask that blocks AI face recognition from every angle. Sure.

[01:57:05] Just walk around with that on. Actually, Neil Stevenson and one of his novels fall or dodge in hell. Actually people are walking around town with these masks on. And one of the things these masks can do is have different personas. So you can choose the persona that you want to display to the AIs and cameras all around you. So, you know, today I'm going to be a, the mild mannered tech reporter tomorrow.

[01:57:32] I'm going to be a punk rocker and you get to choose what it, I mean, that mask, like, you know, if you're making like a sci-fi movie in the future, that was kind of techno dystopian. Yeah. People would be wearing those. So yeah. Or robbing a bank. Let's bring them to market. Right. So like, I don't know, let's make that future happening. Like the cyber truck, like I know people like dump on it, but like, again, like if you were thinking, I'll give, you know, Elon Musk credit. If you were thinking of a movie like 30 years in the future, what a pickup would look like.

[01:58:02] Sure. Right. That's a prop for a movie. So he just made it. That's all. But no, I think people should do these things. Article in the AP today. One tech tip. Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you could do about it. Sam, you've been telling me this for years. Is, are all modern cars spying on us? To some degree or another, pretty much. Yeah. This is from Kelvin Chan. Who's almost all new cars now have built in data modems. Yeah. Yeah. But that's a feature for us.

[01:58:32] That's like on star or. It's a feature. It's a feature that we can benefit from, but it's also a feature that the manufacturers benefit from. You know, I mean, GM, you know, started this in 1996 when they launched the original version of on star. And it's gotten significantly progressively more sophisticated. They got in trouble. They were banned for five years from disclosing data collected from drivers to consumer reporting agencies. They had been doing that. Yeah. Well, other manufacturers are doing it too. They're,

[01:59:00] they're sharing information with companies like Verisk and Okta that are, you know, that they, they collect, they aggregate information about driver behavior. Yeah. Whether you're driving too fast or driving at night. And they're sharing it, you know, directly with insurance companies. That's the real, like, yeah, I think people, you know, when it comes to advertising, people just accept it, right? It's like, all right, there, I sell my data to some advertiser, whatever. But this idea of like,

[01:59:30] it's going to insurance companies and all of a sudden people's insurance rates are going up because of the way they're driving. And, but that is, isn't that how it should be? If you're a crappy driver, why should I be paying? You should pay more for your insurance. Yeah. But that's not, that's not something that I'm going to opt into, right? As a consumer. That's why they don't ask. My car, my car is supposed to be on my side. This is not knocking me out to the insurance company. Insurance pools are supposed to work is you,

[01:59:56] you aggregate the risk across the entire population. But insurance companies do all they can to figure out which kind of, like if you're a teenage boy, you're going to pay more because you're not, because you are a bad driver, but just because statistically you're more likely. progressive has an opt in system, right? Where you actually use the sensor. Yeah. Yeah. And so every insurance company will either give you a dongle or on most newer cars, you can, you can opt,

[02:00:23] opt in to sharing your data directly with your insurer instead of using the dongle. And they give you at least the care of will lower your, you're seeing a chance of a lower premium. So like, at least there's that. There's also the opposite side of that too. Your insurance premium could go up, which is what happens with Tesla. If you get Tesla insurance, they will actually adjust your premiums, not just every six months or every year, but from month to month. So if in any given month you accelerate too hard,

[02:00:52] too many times or hit the brakes too hard, too many times, the next month, your insurance premiums can go up significantly. And that almost makes sense too, because that's what they also use to get people into the full self driving betas, right? Is if you're a good driver, you get early access to those features. So, but I've also heard, heard good things from Tesla insurance in terms of their pricing. But well, again, it depends if, if you are a very careful driver, you can save money on it because,

[02:01:22] you know, with other insurance companies, Teslas are expensive to insure because they are very expensive to repair. And so the, the insurance, the insurance premiums for those vehicles tend to be higher. And if you are a, a very careful driver, you can save money with Tesla insurance. That's why they created it. But then they also realized they had so much data that they could also make a lot more money by raising premiums significantly on drivers who had even slightly higher risk factors in,

[02:01:51] in their driving behavior. So this AP report has a link to a comp, a, a vehicle privacy report from privacy for cars. So I just entered my VIN and it tells me what my car is collecting. It's not collecting biometrics, but it is collecting a user profile location identifiers. It sells it to, doesn't sell it to insurance agencies, but it does sell it to the government. Oh, that's good. And then it,

[02:02:20] which nice to give you some action buttons. So you can file a privacy request. You can ask government officials to act. I think that's kind of, is this, do you know if this, Sam, is this something you're familiar with? Is this, is this legit? Yeah. yeah. I mean, I don't know how it's hard to say, you know, how effective it really is, how much you can really protect your privacy with rules like this. Right. Really? The only way that you can truly protect your privacy is by, you know,

[02:02:50] going in and turning off the data modem entirely. And you may not want to do it. What are the downsides to doing that? Well, you, you lose access, potentially lose access to a lot of services. So a lot of vehicles today, you know, increasingly manufacturers are opting to opting into using Android automotive as the, the operating system for their infotainment systems. And they've got Google automotive services. So you've got Google maps, you've got Google assistant, you've got the play store, so you can download apps right in there.

[02:03:17] So you don't have to connect your phone to the vehicle, you know, which is, you know, the smart, smartphone projection like CarPlay and Android auto is very problematic. You know, oftentimes, you know, you will, your phone will get disconnected while you're driving. And, you know, it's not, it's not very, it's not a very reliable system oftentimes. And so having it built into the vehicles, a much more robust system. But again, it doesn't work unless your vehicle is connected to the network.

[02:03:47] And also, you know, manufacturers, when you buy one of those vehicles, they will give you some period of time when you get complimentary connectivity. Usually it's anywhere from one to three years, although GM on their EVs where they don't even have projection, the CarPlay or Android auto available. They actually give you eight years of connectivity. Uh, that means that for the first eight years, your car is going to be connected to GM's network and they can also harvest data. You know, and some of that is, you know,

[02:04:16] it's not just data that they share to third parties, but some of it is also data that they share about how customers are using their vehicles. And they feed that into their product development process, figure out, okay, what features are people actually using as opposed to, you know, I mean, we put these things in there, but are they actually using them? And, you know, so then, you know, maybe in future models, they, they eliminate the stuff that nobody's actually using. Uh, so there's, there's upsides and downsides to it. Uh, but you know, really the, the only way, you know,

[02:04:44] is to just disconnect the vehicle entirely or just, you know, drive an old car like I do. Yeah. Uh, it does, they do have some opt-out features, right? It depends on the state you live in. I imagine in California, there is quite a bit of opt-out. So it's, it's, it's mostly all in or all out. Oh, you do. It's, it's, it's usually not feature by feature. It's, you know, you can, you can have the service or you turn it off entirely. Do you think that's a kind of dark pattern? Yeah. Because you want the benefits.

[02:05:14] I like, I want the maps to work. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, you don't, without it, you know, you won't have any navigation. Right. Uh, you won't have any, uh, I don't know how to drive anymore. If I didn't have the GPS, yes, I wouldn't, I wouldn't get anywhere. I'm just like, you know, what, a turn? What? You, uh, you sent me a, uh, a fun video of the, uh, original EV. Yeah. Before, before we get to that, I want to say, you know, one other thing last week,

[02:05:41] I was talking to a company that is doing some interesting stuff. So a lot of new cars, you know, and Leo, you first saw this when we drove that Cadillac CT six, the supercruise all those years ago, more and more new cars. Cars have driver monitor systems. Yeah. That are, um, you know, looking to see, you know, when you're using systems like this, they want to see, you know, are you actually, you know, they want to make sure you're actually watching the road and keep, you know, paying attention so you can take over control. And some cases,

[02:06:09] even some cars that don't have hands free capability are including that, uh, now including those driver monitor cameras to look for driver distraction or drowsiness, you know, so they can give you alerts, you know, that, Hey, okay, maybe, you know, if you're, if it looks like you're. My car yells at me. If I pick my nose, it says you're not paying attention. Yeah. Now that seems a little intrusive. Well, you know, I mean that if you can't pick your nose in your own car, what, where can you, you know, I mean, you know,

[02:06:39] if you're, if you're, if you're driving while you're tired, you know, that's as dangerous as being impaired. I agree. And so, you know, having something that can alert you to that and say, Hey, you know, maybe it's time to pull over and take a break. Um, you know, but this company is utilizing that capability along with the connectivity and AI and, and also, uh, GPS location of the vehicle so that, um, you know, what you can do now is, you know, if you see something, you know,

[02:07:07] if you see a business or you see a sign, you know, and you say, you know, and I forget what the keyword is, but you say a keyword and say, what is that? And then it'll grab your current location. And it uses that camera to figure out your gaze, to figure out what you're looking at from your current location. And it will give you information about what that is, what that business is. And so traditionally, these driver monitor systems have been completely localized. They weren't sending that data anywhere.

[02:07:36] It was just being used in real time to monitor the driver state. But now they're starting to use that to figure out, okay, what are you looking at? And I can definitely see where, you know, it starts to go, you know, beyond that, even without you asking, it can be, it's for figuring out what you're looking at. What's, what's getting your attention as you're driving. And that's, you know, that's something. Cars are getting really like sort of Orwellian. In the last, I don't know when I started noticing this,

[02:08:06] maybe in the last year, whenever I rent a car in Europe, the, if you're, one kilometer over the speed limit, it will beep at you. Well, that's, that's a new European regulation. Yes. And it's a nightmare. One, one, what? One mile over the speed. Yeah. If you're, as much as one mile an hour over the speed limit, it will beep at you until you go below it again. Usually you can set that threshold. I remember my Singaporean track taxi driver going, don't worry about it. Yeah. It's beep, beep,

[02:08:36] beep, beep, beep, all the way down. It's so annoying. But, but I don't think anybody in America drives the speed limit. No people. it depends. You know, I mean, if you're, if you're in Manhattan, you know, the average speeds of miles an hour. Oh yes. If you can't drive, you're on the four Oh five. Yeah. I'm just saying when, when people can. Yeah. They, I mean, this is one of the best reasons to live in the United States is you're not harassed by the, in Australia, they have a law that says if people in the backseat don't have their seatbelt,

[02:09:05] the seatbelt thing beeps, you know, that's probably a good idea, but still you add up all these, all these different things. And the car is just, just nagging you constantly about the lane. You get too close to the lane. There's something near you. You're over the speed limit. It's like, what are you married to it? I was driving something last week, you know, and I was, all I wanted to do is just reposition the car in my driveway. And, you know, sometimes, you know, if I'm repositioning, you know, I mean, normally I always wear a seatbelt,

[02:09:34] but sometimes if I'm just moving a car around, you know, I will hop in, you know, just put it in reverse back and move and just move it over without necessarily buckling up. And it would not even go into driver reverse until I put my seatbelt on. Yeah. It would not leave park. My, my car does that. It doesn't, it doesn't put the seat in position or anything until I fastened my seatbelt. And then everything got us. Okay. Now we can drive. Yeah. I mean, it's like, I agree. You know, this is all,

[02:10:04] it has potential for abuse. And I think that's, this is always a downside with all this stuff. It's like, on one hand, it's extremely helpful. Automotive deaths are huge United States. They're, you know, drunk driving, just poor driving. Like a lot of that is just common. And so this is a way to combat that and save a lot of lives. It's also the potential to save money on insurance and repairs and everything else. The problem is, is that all,

[02:10:32] we never see the savings ourselves because everything is for profit. So like whatever savings insurance companies are going to get from this goes back to the shareholders. And we're not going to get it because right now, if you go online and despite all this technology and everything that's happening, all you see are people complaining about car insurance rates going up by a lot. A lot of people's, their rates are just going up and up all across the country, no matter how old they are. And it's just like,

[02:10:59] no one is getting the benefits from it in this in terms of lower costs. And that's where really like really bothers me is that we're not seeing the benefits. You could make the same arguments with like health, right? So we're all wearing smart bands and measuring our sleep. And so like, in theory, all that information could go to your doctor and they could lower your insurance because you're a healthier person, but they won't, you know? And so then it's just like, you know, that's where, I don't know.

[02:11:28] I see it as a part of the transition to self-driving where, where AI is, is in control of the vehicle. Because when you're actually driving around, one of these cars is beeping at you because of the speed limit. It's superseding your judgment. So if I'm on a, if I'm on a quiet country road in the middle of the night where I know there's no traffic around, I can see for 10 miles ahead of me and I want to go one kilometer over the speed limit, it won't let me because that's machine thinking. Right? So I'm,

[02:11:56] I'm actually functioning as an AI just following this algorithm. That's right. Instead of human judgment. Yeah. And so, and so one by one, these little features will chip away at our individual autonomy to the point where at some point we give up all autonomy. We just get in and we, we, the, the, the, the car drives us. Why not? My 36 year old car doesn't have any of that. Beautiful. Yep. Drives a Miata. No, I used to drive Miata.

[02:12:26] They're wonderful. First generation. Oh, nice. Until an SUV rolls over it. Well, yeah, but you know, at that, at that point, I won't care because I'll, I'll be dead anyway. I'm well aware of the risks of that's the right. I'm driving that car. I, you know, I know that I am almost entirely unprotected in that thing. You're watching this week in tech. Daniel, Sam Apple, Samet, who lives life on the edge, Mike Elgin. And yes, me. So glad you're here,

[02:12:56] especially our club to it members. Thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. Our spot. We'll have more in a bit, but first a word from our sponsor, Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform, the potential rewards of AI. I mean, we know about those are too great to ignore, but there are also risks. If you're using AI in your business, loss of sensitive data. There's also the issue of attacks against enterprise managed AI.

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[02:14:49] With zero trust plus AI, you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition and you can remain resilient, even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more at Zscaler.com slash security. That's Zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for the support of this week in tech. I just wanted to mention, I started to talk about the, the EV one, which was the first EV. In fact,

[02:15:18] wasn't there a great documentary about how general motors killed the electric car, killed the electric car. Somebody has, there is one privately owned GM EV one out there. And there's a, there's a YouTube video all about it. Yeah. Yeah. So when, when GM launched the EV one in 1997, they did it in response to the first round of California air resources board mandates for,

[02:15:47] seems like a good idea. To be sold. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, they, in like 1989, they had debuted a concept called the impact. Um, and it got so much. Okay. First of all, terrible name for a car. I just want to say impact. Really? Nonetheless crash 2000. I mean, come on. Okay. You know, it got such, so much positive attention that they decided to go ahead and put it in production. And so when they finally launched it in, uh, 19,

[02:16:17] 1997, you know, what happened was they, they, uh, they never actually sold them to consumers. They only leased them. Ah, um, and they, they built them for about five years. Um, and they built about 1100 or a little more than 1100. Tiny number. Yeah. Um, and yeah, they were, uh, you know, the original ones, the first generation ones used lead acid batteries. Uh, but there's your problem right there. Well,

[02:16:47] but that's, that's what was available. How much capacity could you have? They had a range of about, well, a rated range of 78 miles, uh, by the current standards, the way they test them now, uh, it equates to about 55 miles. Yeah. So they could go, depending on how you drove it. It was, it was about, you know, 50 to 70 miles. Do they charge faster than lithium ion? Uh, no, no, but, but it was, it was technology that was available at the time, you know,

[02:17:17] which is what Toyota was using in their hybrids. Um, and, you know, lithium ion batteries just weren't, uh, it wasn't practical at that time to put into a vehicle. Right. It wasn't until several years later that the first lithium ion battery EVs, uh, were produced. So they, they, they only leased these things and they, you know, they were, these things were, you know, I mean, it was, it was an incredibly sophisticated car for its time. Uh, but they were basically hand built and most of the parts in this thing were

[02:17:46] completely bespoke. They used very few parts that were shared with other GM vehicles. And, you know, they, they were running into a problem where, you know, they were building these things, um, by hand, essentially at a, factory in Lansing, Michigan that ironically was called the GM craft center. Um, and, uh, so they, in 1993 or 94, I think they decided to withdraw them because they, they did not want to compete,

[02:18:16] continue to support these things because there were too many potential things that could go wrong with these cars. You know, there were, they, like I said, they were really sophisticated. The owner, the, the, the drivers loved them, but there were a lot of challenges with it, with supporting these things because, there were so many bespoke components and so much of it, so much of the car was, was, um, you know, what was, you know, kind of each vehicle was to alarm. It was to some degree, totally unique from all of the others. And,

[02:18:46] uh, so, you know, they, they went to the, the, the customers that were leasing these things and said, okay, you got to give them back to us now. Um, and they sent most of them to the crusher, uh, to avoid them being, being kept out in the wild and, and being, uh, used, you know, with, without proper support. Um, they kept about 40 of them and they, quote unquote, decommissioned them, uh,

[02:19:13] which means they took out the batteries and they did something, you know, they cut some, some cables and so on and, and did some other things to make sure that they couldn't actually run. And then they, they gave these to various academic institutions, universities, you know, to use for research and study. Um, and one of these, uh, you know, some of them are, you know, a lot of them are in museums now. Um,

[02:19:39] one of these went to Clark Atlanta university and, uh, it was used for a while. Uh, well, obviously wasn't driven, uh, but engineering students studied this thing. Uh, and then it basically got set aside and forgotten about. And so it was sitting in this parking lot, the storage lot at Clark Atlanta university. Uh, it had, uh, it had been in a garage, um, that, uh, had been dead. The garage was damaged in a storm.

[02:20:08] Part of the roof caved in. It shattered the windshield. They moved this thing outside. It was sitting in a lot. It had been sitting there for several years, uh, essentially abandoned. And somebody from the security department of the school said, what's the deal with this thing? Nobody knew what was going on with it. It wasn't being used for anything. And so they called in a towing company and said, here, tow this thing away. And so the towing company got it. And under the laws in Georgia, uh, you know,

[02:20:38] if, you know, they, they post, you know, they, they post online, uh, that, Hey, you know, this car's here. If it's yours, come and claim it and, you know, pay the, pay the storage fee and you can take it away. Well, nobody did. And, um, you know, the, the, the loan agreement, when GM gave it, gave these things to the schools was that they could not sell them or give them away to anybody. Um, you know, and GM could recall them at any time. They never did, but they, they, they had the ability, the legal ability to do so. But under Georgia law,

[02:21:07] because the storage company, the vehicle been declared abandoned. They, uh, the towing company towed it away. It was, they did all the things they're supposed to do with posting it, you know, saying, Hey, you know, come and claim it if it's yours, nobody did. So they put it up for auction. And so it was on this auction site and it ended up selling for $104,000. Yeah. It was, what was not drivable, had no, no battery in it. And so it made for perfect, you know,

[02:21:37] they probably made more than that on their YouTube channel, right? Probably. Yeah. And, and so, uh, yeah, there's now been a couple of videos about this thing. I spent a couple of hours over the last couple of days watching the latest video. This is the questionable garage, which is a great name for a car channel. Yeah. This guy that does this channel, the questionable garage, he's done all kinds of weird restorations on various cars. He, he did a GM S 10 EV, uh, that was also built in the late nineties. They built, uh,

[02:22:05] like about 150 of those. Um, and he's got one that's actually, he's got running. Hey Mike, maybe when your son, Kevin gets tired of his hydrogen vehicle, he could sell it to these guys for us. That's a great idea. The future looks grim for hydrogen, but he still drives it. He does. He's driving it at this very moment from Los Angeles. He's got a, he's got a Toyota. Mirai. Yeah. Mirai. You got a first gen or a second gen Mirai? Uh, I don't know. Is it the ugly one or the good? No, it's beautiful.

[02:22:34] It's like a luxury car. And, and because he lives around the corner from a hydrogen filling station. Yeah. Here in the Bay area, they're everywhere. And it makes sense on the street. Yeah. Uh, and didn't, didn't you tell me he gets free hydrogen for life? No, not for life. It was for a bunch of years as part of the incentive to get him to buy it. Yeah. It was like six years or something like that. So this video, they're starting the restoration and they're basically taking the car completely apart to clean everything, fix everything. Are they going to get it working?

[02:23:04] The goal is to eventually get it running. Yes. Wow. Um, and you know, one again, because there's so many unique parts on this thing, like that windshield, they can't just call safe light and say, Hey, come and replace the windshield on this EV one. Cause there's no stock of these things. Right. So what they, what they did was they, uh, they, they got some, um, matte vinyl wrap and put it across the windshield and put on a bunch of dots. And they got a laser scanner and they made a 3d model of it.

[02:23:34] So they're going to try and get somebody to fabricate a windshield. And this is what YouTube is great for, because these are just, this is just some shade tree mechanics probably, but yeah, but they can make, they can monetize it. They can actually make this happen. You don't have to go to NBC and say, give me $8 million for, we'll make a TV show about this thing. And they'd never get the money. Uh, this is, this is fantastic. Yeah. But as you watch this and you see it is taking parts off, you see things like there's, there's parts where they, you know,

[02:24:03] where there was obviously an interference, uh, like by the front doors, you know, there was a bracket that you can see where it was actually cut by hand with tin snips. Wow. So that, so it didn't interfere with the door when they opened the door. And there's other places where you can see where they whack it with a hammer to get the roof panel to fit. It's handmade. Yeah. They have the opportunity here to do the funniest thing ever, which is just put a ice engine in and just make it.

[02:24:33] They insult everyone. Yeah. You know, I mean, this is the only EV one in private hands anywhere. Wow. And so they, they want to get it back via illegal loophole. They can, GM doesn't get it back. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Wow. So it's pretty cool. There's it. I mean, if you have any interest in EVs, especially early EVs, it's, it's worth, you know, like I said, it's about, this one was about two hours, but it's,

[02:24:58] it's fascinating to watch and see some of the things that GM did on this car, you know, creating, I mean, it's all, you know, the structure is all aluminum. Do you think in, in all honesty, that their intent was to create a market for an electric vehicle? Yeah, I think so. They thought there was something there. Yeah. You know, I mean, GM spent a lot of money and spent a lot of time developing this vehicle. I mean, it is, like I said, it is a really sophisticated vehicle,

[02:25:26] especially for the 1990s. The time wasn't right. That's all. Yeah, it wasn't, the time wasn't right. The technology wasn't right yet. They didn't,

[02:25:34] they didn't have the battery technology.

[02:26:04] They actually do a lithium ion EV, you know, and they built this little sports car from a kit car. They took a kit car and modified it and, and put, built a, and a lithium ion battery pack for it. And that car was called the T zero. And a couple of guys named Martin ever hard and Mark tarpening, you know, and found this thing. And they got a test drive in it and said, Oh, we, we want, we want this. We, you know, build, build,

[02:26:33] build Elon did with the Lotus Elise, right? Elon didn't actually do that. Somebody, but the original founders, Martin, Martin, yeah, Martin, that's Martin, Martin ever hard and Mark tarpening. Oh, you're talking about them. Yes. And, and AC, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut to the punchline. Didn't want to build it. So they said, okay, we'll do it. Sounded familiar. They licensed some technology from those guys and they went to Lotus and got a chassis and had that modified.

[02:27:00] And that eventually became the first generation Tesla Roadster. I'm sorry. Elon came along later with funding. You know, he was, he provided funding, right? You know, it was Mark and Martin who were the founders, but he also, to his credit, he saw that and said, you know, there could be a business there. Yeah. Oh, no, absolutely. I mean, you know, if, if he had not put in that $30 million initial investment, right? The roadster never would have, never would have gotten off the ground.

[02:27:29] I remember when we were back in the cottage 15, 20 years ago, one of our listeners had a roadster, drove it, came out. Dick D. Bartola and I got in, went for a ride. It was tiny little thing. That Lotus Elise is not a big car, but that was pretty exciting. Well, actually the, the Elise is smaller than the roadster. The Elise is so small that they actually stretched. They, they extended the Elise chassis by about eight inches. I just remember the seats were a little tight. Yeah.

[02:27:59] They were. I wanted to ask you, Daniel, if we should be worried about Ram prices, you know, we talked about the fact that AI is driving power consumption, but it's also thanks to GPUs, driving Ram prices through the roof. Some Ram kits for this from Mars technica, Andrew Cunningham are over three times as expensive as they were 90 days ago. Is this something we should worry about? Yep. It's,

[02:28:28] it's also expected to impact, obviously the laptop market for next year. Yeah. All OEMs I'm hearing are expecting prices to go up. Lenovo stockpiled a bunch of chips to avoid this, but will that be enough? Lenovo, Lenovo is the largest PC maker on the planet. So that makes sense. And they're smart for doing that. You know, they get a lot of their business also to through enterprise.

[02:28:55] So they have a lot of customers that rely on them for that stuff besides just the consumer market. So they can do that. There's already reports that Microsoft hasn't done this for Xbox, which is why there seems to be a dearth of sales for Xbox consoles this year, despite Sony offering some sales because Sony looks like they paid attention and planned ahead. On the other hand,

[02:29:23] it's ironic that Microsoft is doing cloud gaming, which is using all those Ram chips and GPUs, thereby driving up the prices so much that they can't afford them out for the Xbox consoles. Yeah. I think this is going to be an interesting problem. I don't know expectations for when prices could come down, but yeah, that's why if people are interested in getting a laptop or need one,

[02:29:50] you may want to actually take a serious look at some of the sales going on. Because right now some of the current stock is really good. And, you know, I've seen a new Qualcomm chips. Don't get me wrong. They're really good. And they're making some huge strides as someone who runs a surface laptop, seven surface pro 11 with Snapdragon chips. I don't feel like I need a new processor at this point, which is kind of a first, but I did announce it at the, in Hawaii, they're going to have this next generation. The X2. Elite, the X2. Yeah.

[02:30:20] And they're pretty massive jumps in performance. And for some people, they're going to really benefit, but this is sort of the Apple thing. A lot of people who bought the M1 Macs are still happy with M1. Do they not use unified RAM like Apple does? Because Apple, So the new X2 does. Does. Does it still get hit by the cost of DDR5 going up? Right. So, you know, I'm hearing the, some of the new laptops, I believe have 48 megabytes of RAM is like the minimum. Gigabytes. 40s X2s are gigabytes because of,

[02:30:49] because of the shared with the GPU and everything else. So, so they're not buying NAND chips or are they? I mean, what's, what is, it's still a NAND chip in there, isn't it? Yeah, it's still NAND. So it's still, so it's still going to affect the price of even unified memory, even Apple. Yeah. Yeah. So I expect all those to go up in price. There's a, we, we always, I used to affect it. I did a video for them back in the day on how to build your own computer. There's a great,

[02:31:15] one of the last remaining PC component stores in San Francisco down on market street called, or actually something it's on mission or Harrison called central computer. And it's gotten so express, it's gotten so expensive. Now they don't have a price on the Ram. They do market pricing. The verge said they sell it like lobster. Yeah. You know, when you go to a restaurant and the menu says market price, when you order, they're selling it at, they don't put price tags on there. We keep,

[02:31:45] because of the price increase, we can't display fixed prices on certain products at this time. Just ask. You have to ask. That's wild. That's wild. So this is good to know. See, I've been, I'm kind of holding off until next year's Apple MacBook pro. That's going to be an M six. It's going to have an OLED screen. It, it's, it seems like this. I have, I'm pretty satisfied with the M three I've got. So I'm thinking if I wait till next year, but am I going to, are we going to see big price increases?

[02:32:14] I think there's definitely a possibility for it. Yeah. But now how much is big, right? If it's one or $200 extra. That's okay. I can live with that for Apple people. I feel like that's just, you know, they're going to charge a lot more. Yeah. Right. Right. But for, you know, for laptops that are like the six, $700 range, right. This impacts things. And Apple is rumored to be bringing a much more affordable laptop to the market, which I think this would, and the rumor is they're going to have Intel make the chip. All right. Yeah.

[02:32:44] Which is wild. It'll still be, it won't be an Intel chip. It'll be an Apple designs, Apple Silicon. Yeah. Intel core three coming out. They're doing better. Don't count Intel out. I realize. Yeah. They have a lot of potential. This idea between X86 and arm and that X86 is doomed is definitely overhyped. You know, exit there's nothing inherently in design of an X86 that makes it well, completely inefficient to arm,

[02:33:13] but if I'm going to buy an X86, I'm going to buy an AMD, not an Intel. Right. Is that foolish of me? I, I, it depends. If you're a gamer, AMD. Sure. If you want like, uh, ultra books, Intel still has a better package by which I mean, things like human presence detection, the idea that the computer detects you. The stuff that's on the system on a chip is better. Yeah. Intel and Qualcomm both do those. If you want five junior laptop, that's Intel and Qualcomm. Okay.

[02:33:43] So for mobile computing, AMD is, if you want the latest technologies for a long time, it's still hard to find an AMD ultra book with a 4k touch OLED display. Both my desktops are in most my X86 desktops. Yeah. So it makes sense. I think on desktop AMD or King, right? They do a lot of good there, but when it comes to laptops and this isn't necessarily AMD's fault, it's just that Intel has such strong connections to the OEMs.

[02:34:11] They help design the laptops to help with marketing and they offer these packages. You know, they do the wifi, they do the Bluetooth, they do the 5g, they do, they do all this and they can just offer a better package. It's more affordable, uh, to these companies. Uh, so I don't want to count. Well, this is good, right? Because it means we have Snapdragon, we have X86, we have Apple Silicon, we have competition. That's good. And they all feed on each other, improve on, uh, based on what the other guys do. Qualcomm's new chips. Yeah.

[02:34:40] Qualcomm's new chips have 80 tops for the NPU, which is like, that's double with the original Copilot plus PCs. And like Intel will be at 50 for their new chips. So it's just like, you know, now what do you do with 80 tops? Well, technically nothing, but the point is you, you put that hardware in people's hands and to developers hands. And now you can do some pretty crazy localized AI. So it should be interesting. Well, that's why when you're running that localized AI, what that 34 hours of, of battery life, what does that become about 3.4 hours?

[02:35:09] No, actually. So NPUs are, that's like, what's awesome about the NPU is they're extremely efficient. So they can run tasks in the background. So something like windows recall, which is basically taking thousands of snapshots of your computer is running on the NPU and it barely impacts battery life. The NPU is like one of those things that is just like, it is so precisely designed for a specific task, but it's so efficient at what it does that it does.

[02:35:37] This is why Microsoft has been very stringent with the Copilot plus designation. Like desktops don't have it. Like I have a 50, 80, I think in this desktop, it's not a Copilot plus PC. Why? An NVIDIA GPU with its tensor course will crush any kind of NPU in a laptop, but because of the efficiency, because it's going to use a lot of power of that GPU just to do those basic tasks that it's not the kind of experience that, you know, Microsoft actually wants.

[02:36:06] So until they get NPUs into desktops, they're not going to allow, as far as I know, NVIDIA to be able to do that task. Well, I guess I'll just kind of keep an eye on things and just be happy with what I got. You'll be able to afford the new laptops and new Macs. I think you'll be okay. I hope so. It's great to see you. Daniel Rubino is the editor in chief of Windows Central. That's where you can keep up on all of this, including the Dell and HP earnings from this week, which we didn't get to,

[02:36:35] but I think the PC marketplace is warming up a little bit. It's very interesting right now. Although Dell said about half a billion people are not upgrading to Windows 11. They're sticking with their old Windows 10 PCs, which cannot be good news for Microsoft. That's a little, that's a little scary. Yeah. Yeah. There's going to be a, yeah, no problem. It's great to see you. Sam Abul Salmon, my car guy, gives me great advice. In a year,

[02:37:03] you're going to have to help me decide what to replace the BMW with. We'll have some good choices by then, I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's plenty of good options. I just know I'm never buying a gas car again. I just love EVs. I'm so happy. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we've, we've come, you know, now that my wife's been driving an EV since July. She has the Niro, right? Yeah. She doesn't. Yeah. She doesn't want to go back to a gas car. It spoils you. Yeah. Now, if I had that hydrogen car, maybe is that, what is the torque on a hydrogen car?

[02:37:33] It's good. It's the same. It's an EV. It's an EV, but it doesn't have batteries. It just burns hydrogen. Okay. Yeah. It's, it's generating the electricity on the fly instead of storing. So it's still, it still has electric motors. So fuel cell just takes hydrogen and oxygen and produces electricity and water. You could drink out of the tailpipe. Yes. But don't. I, I drove to Los Angeles in my Prius, which is plug in hybrid. And my son, I was following my son.

[02:38:01] Cause we were going to universal studios and stuff like that. And so I was following him and you know, you'd hit a Hill and he hit the gas and you see this, it's like water. Cause come spraying out the back. It was pretty cool. Very different from a regular car. Yeah. That's Mike Elgin. You can read about his AI journey at machine society.ai. He also does a podcast with the wonderful Emily Forlini. That's right. Called super intelligent.

[02:38:31] I love the name. We have a lot of fun. We have a lot of fun. Yeah. And of course, gastronomad.net. If you want to know about those incredible gastronomad adventures all over the world with Mike and Amira. We did one a couple of years ago in Oaxaca. It was one of the best travel experiences we've ever had. Next year, Leo is our 10th anniversary. Oh my God. You've been doing that. The 10th anniversary of the founding of the company. And so we're going to be doing incredible,

[02:38:59] like we're going to have a crazy great year next year. So if you ever want. All right. I think it's time for me to go on another one. I think it is too. Yeah. It's going to be fantastic. And travel gets worse and worse every year. It's gotten really bad lately. The crowds. Thanks to Instagram. I really blame Instagram. It's all these influencers out there standing in the lavender and, you know, doing the TikTok dance. Yeah. And ruining it for the rest of us. That's right. And just got to go find a nice secluded beach somewhere. Oh,

[02:39:27] we do that. We find a lot of nice secluded everything. You find the places the influencers don't know about yet. Exactly. And it's all no downsides. You don't have to rent a car. You don't have to deal with the hassles. You don't have to deal with traffic. Do you curate the people who join your trips, you know, and make sure, you know, don't allow any influencers? No, we have very, actually by far, Leo is the most influential person we've ever had. That is for certain. No, we actually, you know,

[02:39:57] we find it's very self-selecting. The people who do these experiences, they're just fantastic people. It is. I don't know. It's a miracle, but great conversations. You all sit around a big table. It's just a handful of couples, you know, maybe four or five couples. So it's a small group. Oh, I just really had a wonderful time. So what's the, so next year, huh? That's the, that's going to be incredible. Next year is going to be really, really, it's going to be extra, super special next year because we're celebrating the entire year, our 10,

[02:40:25] 10 years doing this. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. 2006. It all began gastronomad.net. And Kevin is still, uh, I know he's working at Kagi now, but hello chatterbox is still going strong, right? They have nice sales going. He's got other people running it, but, um, but yeah, it's a teaching, uh, teaching, uh, literacy. The smart speaker that teaches coding skills, right? It's a, it's a great thing. People love it. Schools love it. And, uh, and so it's,

[02:40:54] it's still a going concern. And so many of the things that he developed building this product around privacy, around how to, uh, provide content. That's really user driven. He's bringing some of that knowledge to Kagi, all of that knowledge to Kagi. And it's, it's really a great fit at Kagi based on what he did here. But yeah, it's good. Chatterbox is still great. Still, uh, uh, a very good educational product. I love to everybody, including princess squishy face. That's right. Wished me a happy birthday.

[02:41:24] And that was very nice of her. Uh, thank you, Mike Elgin. Thank you, Sam. Uh, thank you, Daniel. Thanks to all of you who join us this week. Uh, and every week we do twit Sundays, two to 5 PM Pacific five to eight Eastern 2200 UTC. You can join us live in the club twit discord. Of course, we'd love to have you in the club. If you're not a member of twit.tv slash club twit, this is a good time to do it. Now through Christmas, there is a 10% off coupon.

[02:41:52] So a good time to gift yourself or someone in your life with the gift of twit. Uh, we also stream it live for everybody. YouTube, Twitch, uh, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and kick. So you can watch us live at that time, but really most people prefer to watch at their leisure, at their convenience, uh, which I would encourage download a copy of the show, audio or video, or both from twit.tv, the website, or, uh, there's a YouTube channel with a video dedicated to a twit.

[02:42:21] Great way to share clips or subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically. The minute it's available. I think we were like number 92 on Apple's top podcast lists. We were somewhat far down, which is true because, you know, you've been around for 20 years. You don't get a lot of new subscribers every week, but help us, help us a little bit. Put a nice review there on the Apple podcast app or whatever app you use. Let the world know about, uh,

[02:42:49] the probably longest running tech podcast out there. Certainly one of them anyway, this week in tech. Thanks for being here, everybody. We'll see you next time. And as I've said for 20 years, another twit is in the can. Take care. He's amazing. He's amazing. He's amazing.