TWiT 1075: The Commonwealth Club - Meta Layoffs, DOGE Data Theft, & the Rise of AI Fails

[00:00:00] It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech, the Ides of March edition. Jennifer Patterson-Tui joins us from The Verge, Richard Campbell from Windows Weekly and Ian Thompson. Big layoffs are coming from Meta. Plus, they don't like their new AI very much. Speaking of bad AI, we'll talk about the woman who lost five months of her life due to incorrect face recognition, the Doge depositions they tried to hide, and he's back.

[00:00:26] Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, says his new company makes gainfully employed robots. TWIT is next. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.

[00:00:47] This is TWIT. This Week in Tech, Episode 1075, recorded Sunday, March 15th, 2026. The Commonwealth Club. It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. And as usual, it was a big and busy week, but fortunately, we've got the best panel here. I love it. Jennifer Patterson-Tui is here, senior reviewer for The Verge. Hello, JPT. Hello, Leo. Lovely to be here, as always.

[00:01:17] Love having you on. Of course, Jennifer's a regular, not only on The Verge, but on our Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent. And covers smart home. And her poor family has to put up with a door that has many locks. Many locks, many doorbells, many robot vacuums. I have UPS guys will come up to my door and be like, okay, there's four, and then they just knock. It's like, who needs a doorbell?

[00:01:44] So many doorbells. Yeah, isn't that funny? We have a ring and nobody ever rings it. Also here, this is a Commonwealth show from Ireland and the UK, now almost a citizen of the United States, Ian Thompson, who does that letter from America. At Techfinitiv, good to see you, Ian. Yes, it's always good to be on. And yeah, here in sunny and very dry California.

[00:02:12] Yeah. And it is going to be very hot. We're going to have a heat wave. Well, very hot by Northern California standards. I suspect Los Angeles is looking at us and sniggering slowly. Oh my gosh, it's in the seventies. What will we do? And host of, of course, Windows Weekly and Runners Radio, the great Richard Campbell joining us from British Columbia. Hello, Richard. Hey, Leo. Nice to see you. Yeah.

[00:02:38] Not, you know, born in New Zealand, grew up in Canada. So all Commonwealth all the time. All Commonwealth, except for me. I am the rebel son. You're the rebel. Yeah. We had to split off and we're sorry about that now. And can we come back, please? Well, I was chatting to somebody about that and it's just like, yes, rejoin under the British monarchy. Oh, Prince Andrew. No, never mind. Never mind. He's not a prince. Let's be clear. No longer. Oh, yes.

[00:03:03] Well, no, they're gradually cutting his name down. So he lost his titles. Then he lost his home. And it's just like, there was a British comedian called Mark Steele who was just like, eventually in about a month or two, it's going to be, oi, Andy, you wanker. Andy, you wanker. Get over here. Yeah. The story, we don't usually talk about Meta on this show because Meta really has become a legacy company to some degree.

[00:03:28] Although Instagram is still going strong, WhatsApp is used all over the world as probably the preferred messaging platform in most of the world, except, you know, the US and China.

[00:03:38] Yeah. But they are facing, I guess, I don't know, hard times. Meta we are seeing is planning massive layoffs as AI counts, the costs mount. This is from Reuters. Reuters says they're going to shrink Meta by 20%. Yeah. That is. Those data centers don't pay for themselves.

[00:04:04] Yeah, they say they're going to spend 600 billion for data centers by 2028. So yeah, you gotta pay for it somehow. Well, I got a disturbing email this week from a software engineer, not a Meta, but a similar company, who was saying basically, for the last six months, he's been instructed to use AI tools. And they've been recording his prompts and his actions. Oh, wow.

[00:04:30] And now they've outsourced his job to two lower grade engineers using the information that he was forced to give them. And I think that's the way it's going. And Meta will do the same. We're hearing this story in a lot of places, in fact, friends of mine who are, in fact, training their replacements instead of a worker from China or in India. It's an AI. Yeah. Well, and Meta has been hiring AI talent from everywhere, right? Yeah, that's not working out so good, is it?

[00:04:59] But also, that's where all the money's going, right? So then it makes sense that they have to lay off other people because they're spending so much money on the AI talent. And then this, what was it, about two years ago, they did like three or four huge rounds of cuts. Yeah. So, yeah. 11,000 two years ago, 10,000. Yeah. Yeah. These cuts weren't actually cuts per se because they never stopped hiring. Which is weird.

[00:05:24] We looked at Microsoft's annual report for last fiscal and they laid off 30,000 and they hired 30,000. So, the total net employment was the same. But they're hiring for different roles, right? So, AI. Yeah, that's a great question whether that's true or not. Or is it just, you only hear about the layoffs and those are good for the stock price. And Meta did acquire two engineers, the guys who did Maltbook.

[00:05:54] They got the whole thing. They got the whole thing. Actually, the only thing that bothered me about that is Ben Parr is one of the two guys. Ben's been on this show many times. I love Ben. Ben's an old friend. I didn't know he did Maltbook. I would have had him talking about that. But anyway, so congratulations, Ben and his partner, Mark. But isn't the bigger arc on this Meta layoff that all of the Magnificent Seven are off so far this year? To the tune of a trillion dollars. Yeah.

[00:06:23] But there's an upside to them. Meta, on Thursday, according to the New York Times, has decided to delay the release of its latest model, Avocado. God, why do they get these names? Well, Avocado, it's got to be perfect, right? There's only a moment where it's just ripe enough. Oh, apparently it's not ripe enough in this case. That's the problem. So they're going to take the seed out, they're going to put it in a glass with toothpicks, and maybe another one will grow.

[00:06:51] Actually, if you want Avocado, there is... Chipotle has an AI they call something like Avocado. And somebody discovered that it's probably Claude in the background, because they gave it a... They said, can you write a Python... After asking it for menu recommendations, could you write a Python program for me? And it did. The Chipotle AI? Yes. Oh God. Yes, on its website. Side of code with your salsa.

[00:07:21] Yes. So that's something you probably should be aware of. If you're going to use an AI on your website, you might want to, you know, like limit the questions. Put some guardrails up. Just a few. Just a few. I don't know if you noticed this when you fire up a lot of web-based LLMs right now, they do a lot of, are you a human validation? Right. Yeah. So clearly they're dealing with exactly that problem. So sick of captchas, please. Yeah, because the bots are hijacking these free LLMs. Right. Right.

[00:07:51] Right. Nah. Meanwhile, of course, Meta's on trial that big case in San Francisco on addiction. The case that Snapchat and TikTok settled out of, but Meta and YouTube are still fighting. And actually it went to the jury on Friday. That's going to be really interesting. Yeah. You said the exact same thing, Ian. No, no, no. I mean, I'm sorry. Jake Zuckerberg on the stand looked really, really uncomfortable. Yeah.

[00:08:20] And it's like, have you, you know, have you actually built your platform where dopamine hits? We're obviously not going to say that, but that's what it is. Um, so a jury trial, that's going to be really interesting. I imagine the jury is probably not sitting during the weekend, but I mean, they, they went out, uh, on Friday. So it should be closing statements when on Thursday, actually it's in Los Angeles.

[00:08:46] Uh, the plaintiff is a 20 year old woman who said she was hooked early on to social media. And as a result has had miserable, a miserable life, which by the way, okay, excuse me. I'm sorry you had a terrible life, but really you're blaming social media for that. It seems a little far fetched to me. I think the real question the jury has to answer is, is there such a thing as social media addiction? Is that even a thing? Right.

[00:09:13] I'm paralyzing this with the smoking addictions and it also took 20 years for the first cases to really start showing up saying this is intentional. And it led to the discovery that eventually found, you know, prove that the company's new and optimize the product for addiction. Right. And we have that same evidence coming out of Facebook. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, the, uh, the 20 year olds, um,

[00:09:40] both defensive plaintiff appointed, this is from a AP to a turbulent home life or the woman, her attorneys say she was preyed upon as a vulnerable user. And there's a lot of smoking gun email evidence that they kind of did prey upon people. You know, they were trying to make them, they were trying to make their sites sticky, but I mean, who isn't right? I wish this show were stickier, but there was that case, uh, about 10, 10 years ago where academics, um, did a,

[00:10:09] uh, paper on how Facebook could change people's opinion based on the news feed that they got in. And there were two scientific papers on this and then Facebook immediately retracted them. Um, Facebook as it was then, you know, this definitely has an effect. Their entire business model is built around it. So yeah, put it up in court. This is the tobacco thing is exactly on point. Yeah. But you can say there's a direct link between smoking and cancer. That's evident there.

[00:10:38] It's much harder to prove that. In fact, both sides, uh, you know, admit that she had a difficult home life before she started using social media. And the defense said that they, she turned to their platforms as a coping mechanism to escape her mental health struggles.

[00:10:58] Uh, it seems like from what I've been reading from our reporting, and we've got a reporter there at the trial and she was saying that they basically, the only thing they have to prove here is that the, the products did cause some form of meaningful harm.

[00:11:13] Which is not a huge leap, um, especially when you're able to examine the, um, as you mentioned at the top, the kind of the dopamine hit, the, the algorithms that are pushing forward, keeping you on there, not necessarily to try and, um, make you happier, but to do whatever it does to pull you in. And that is the, I think that's the key. It's the algorithms.

[00:11:39] Like, is it the algorithms that are actually causing harm by pulling you down into whatever rabbit hole? But how do you prove that harm? I don't understand how you prove that harm. Well, and that's going to be the challenge. But one of the, the piece that, um, uh, we have on the verge that our reporter, um, Lauren Feiner, who's there, she said the entire courtroom. So there's like tickets that you can get to get into one of the 15 public seats in the courtroom. That's how much people want to see this. Wow.

[00:12:08] The entire courtroom outside was full of parents whose children have been meaningfully, they believe have been meaningfully harmed by social media. Either they committed suicide. There was an instance of one girl who was able to get like, uh, fentanyl laced pills off. Do you know it's fentanyl? Well, that's different. If you, yeah, that's definitely liability. If you're buying fentanyl on Facebook, that's liability.

[00:12:33] But the point here, what's so interesting is there are so many parents that have experienced something that's caused significant harm to their children through social media. And it's, it's a fascinating debate to sort of be like, well, how much of this is down to the individual? How much of this is down to what the platform is feeding them? And is the platform making it worse? And if the platform is making it worse, can you prove that that is meaningful harm? And if this, I mean, it's going to be a landmark case either way.

[00:13:02] I would say, I think even if there is not a very good resolution, the fact that it's getting this attention and that people are actually, you know, finally focusing on what, what social media is doing. Is it bad? You know, is it causing harm? It's conversations we've been needing to have for a long time. And I feel like we talk about it every time I come on the show, Leo, but it's not there in the broader, you know, consciousness, I don't think. And I think this is going to push it there.

[00:13:32] I mean, I have two kids who grew up, so I have a 15 and an 18 year old. And so, you know, they were right on the sort of cusp as where social media became sort of all encompassing. That's the way children communicate to some extent. And when you when you look through the issues that some people sort of say, well, some social media is actually good because it does have it's a good way of connecting. It's a good way for people to find their group. It's like back to the old, you know, chat rooms.

[00:14:00] You know, I, I remember on Oscar night 20 years ago, 30 years ago, sitting up with in a chat room with Titanic fans, because Titanic was up for the Oscars. And it was like, you know, the Internet lets you connect with your, with your, you know, your people.

[00:14:16] But once they've grabbed you these platforms, if they're trying without, without, without any care for what cause, what harm it might cause to suck you in and keep you there. That to me feels like a step too far. And that's like with, with, with the tobacco companies, you know, they knew their product was addictive. And, you know, it does Facebook does matter. No, its product was addictive.

[00:14:46] And did it keep making it more addictive? And that causes meaningful harm. I mean, you're right, Leo, it's a hard one to prove, but it's an interesting one to talk about. Yeah. And of course, the next, the next industry that's going to be challenged about this is AI, because this, there are already trials and there will be many, many more from parents who are not. I, and look, my heart goes out to these parents, to the kids. Nobody's saying that these children aren't hurting.

[00:15:13] I think there's a lot of reasons that young people might be hurting these days. But you know, everybody who creates an entertainment is trying to make it sticky. If you binge a Netflix, and this was one of the arguments of the defense lawyers, if you binge a Netflix, actually, I think it was Adam Massari of Instagram. If you binge a Netflix, you know, they want you to watch that, you know, as to your detriment, to the point where you don't eat.

[00:15:41] They're trying to make something that's really compelling. But is that, is that a cause for mental illness? And is it, are you liable for the damages and causes? I don't know. I mean, I think this with video games. Remember that people were saying the same about World of Warcraft. Well, Facebook claims they're not a publisher though. So they're not making any of this stuff. So they're not responsible.

[00:16:05] Well, no, I think there's no question Facebook's liable because if the only argument is whether that caused harm. It's clear that Facebook is more than a publisher. Any company that has an algorithm that surfaces. If you just publish stuff in a chronological order, then you're a publisher. Yeah. But they don't do that. You know, the first step, again, I'm going to use a smoking parallel again. The first steps that happened with the smoking thing was age limiting. You had to be a certain age to be able to buy cigarettes. You know, that, that was the progression.

[00:16:33] So, you know, here we are at the beginning of this and there, you know, that now the argument will be, it's a case of harm, but only for minors. So we'll put an age gain on it. You could make the case that sugary cereals have killed many people. Well, you have. And that litigation's flirting around out there. I guess. Uh, yeah, but I mean, I, I feel for the parents. I feel like they're looking for a scapegoat is what I feel like.

[00:16:57] I think there is enough evidence out there that social media has caused harm for, especially for younger people because, you know, they're not, their, their brains are not fully developed. That impulse control, that addiction focus is much. Yeah. Um, and you know, there is, of course, there's an onus on the parents too, but also a lot of parents of this generation weren't really aware of what was, of how powerful this was. So I, I, I agree.

[00:17:25] It seems like, you know, okay, Netflix, we all want to binge watch, you know, the next season of Stranger Things, but it's, it's a different interaction from sitting and watching a TV show, which is something you may do with your family, um, to interacting with your friends and people like you and your peers on a social media and seeing the way you're supposed to be theoretically. And that, that caught, that's what's causing in, in many ways.

[00:17:53] I think the long, we've seen a huge spike in depression for adolescent, especially adolescent girls. I mean, Instagram was famously has been very bad for body image for teenage girls. And there have been lots of studies about that and, you know, magazines in the eighties and nineties, those were really bad for body image for teenage girls, but there was something different about having magazines on a stand versus having.

[00:18:19] Having a small device that you're lying in bed with and like consuming that's continually sending you data and making you feel worse. And I think the key thing, and this is because I'm a journalist, um, is a curation and being an editorializing. So, you know, a magazine or a Netflix show, you've got people creating the content and having some sort of human input.

[00:18:44] Whereas with social media, the algorithms and, you know, just anyone, anyone out there can throw whatever they want up there. Um, it just feels so much less curated, so much less careful. I mean, there are problems with stuff on TV, but we have age limits on TV shows too, right? That's one of the ways that we're supposed to help, you know, not damage our children by showing them. I watched Silence of the Lambs when I was far too young and I've never recovered. I watched Jaws at the cinema. Yes.

[00:19:12] Um, I just feel like we don't because we could, we sort of dismiss social media because it is so many different things, right? It's not really just one, like Netflix shows you movies and TV shows, but social media shows you everything. And it's overwhelming. And I think that the problem comes down to the algorithms. Um, and this is something that we see throughout the internet, right? We've seen many tech companies be approached, you know, I think YouTube was, are they still in the computer?

[00:19:42] I think there's a case about the algorithm for YouTube where that was, it caused terrorism. I don't know. Did that one get dismissed? Um, but there's, there's a lot of these that comes down to the algorithm, which is where the computer is deciding what you should watch. And that's taking the human element out. And that's where things get scary. Yeah, I think algorithms are problematic, but McDonald's designs its food to be as addictive as possible. Uh, and it, and you could probably make the argument, Dunkin' Donuts have killed more people.

[00:20:12] Well, no, but I mean, I mean, are they liable? Should McDonald's be liable because they made their food, they made happy meals and they addicted children and, and those children suffer from obesity and later, uh, illnesses as a result with a higher mortality. Should we go after McDonald's? Is that similar? I have to say, looking at that new burger, why not? That's disgusting. McDonald's isn't in your face all the time either. Sure it is. It's advertising like crazy.

[00:20:37] Yeah, but you're not getting, you're not, you don't have access, it, access to it 24 seven, especially if you're a 15 year old girl, right? You're not, unless you live around the corner from McDonald's I suppose. Yeah, your phone's not giving you a burger every five minutes. Yeah, but I mean, Well then, then you should, the phone's live. Jennifer is a parent. Jennifer is a parent. It's, this is what really worries me about social media is that the kids can't escape it.

[00:21:02] It used to be, if you got bullied at school, you went out of school and then you went home and you had lived your own life with social media. It's in your face 24 seven. And it, it does seem to cause harm. I'd be curious on your insight on that. Seem is the problem, by the way. Yeah, it's hard to prove. Yeah. I mean, and individuals like, you know, that people may be predisposed to depression and it creates more of, you know, it can pull you further down into that.

[00:21:28] Or you may have been completely well adjusted and then you get cyber bullied by people in your school. I mean, my daughter's school has like a online burn book on Instagram, you know, which is just horrific. I don't let my daughter anywhere near Instagram. But yeah, there's, it's a way. That was that Netflix show adolescence, right? That was, that was why that grabbed people because that was what that was about. And that's what we're seeing.

[00:21:52] And yeah, it's also one of the things, you know, outside of the algorithm side is you, I was reading a story recently where someone was talking to, it was a teacher and they were talking about like at recess or when the bell rings, you know, 20 years ago, the halls would be so loud. Right. You could barely hear yourself talk. Everyone's playing, chatting, talking. And now it's quiet because as soon as people get out of the classroom, they look on their phone.

[00:22:18] So that real, you know, social media is taking away real socialization in real life socialization. I mean, and that's caused, that's one of the issues causing a lot of harm. And, you know, COVID compounded it because kids were literally not allowed to hang out with their friends for over a year. Yeah. That could be, I mean, COVID, there's a lot of reasons a kid might be depressed now that I think are legitimate. Yeah.

[00:22:47] I think the pro my problem is, is you can prove a causal relationship between cigarettes and cancer. That's very clear. It's much more difficult to prove that causal relationship with social media. It's seen, it's one of those things that feels like it's bad. It seems like it's bad. We kind of all agree. Yeah, it must be bad, but there it's very hard to demonstrate the causal relationship. Yeah. And, and I worry because, well, we'll find out this trial. This is why I think a jury trial. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:15] I mean, this is why I think a jury trial is fascinating for this because you actually get input from people at the sharp end. You know, it's not. Yes. There'll be the long arguments about whether or not tobacco causes cancer. And then it was finally proved when it comes to social media, it's much more fluid. But having a jury trial and having people whose kids and relatives have been involved in this, I think that's going to be a very interesting result. Well, we'll find out. I think we'll find out this week.

[00:23:43] And I think both YouTube and Meta are watching with great interest to see what happens. And you can tell, I mean, the fact that Snapchat and TikTok settled out short, right before the trial tells you they had some real concerns about their liabilities. Yeah. Let's take a little break. We have more stuff. Is that one of your house? Is that your house talking to you? Someone just rang the doorbell. Someone's at the doorbell. Sorry. You know, you now have all those interesting voices with Alexa Plus.

[00:24:12] You did not like Alexa Plus, did you? Sassy. Sassy voice. I picked sassy. I did too. Lisa loves sassy. She loves it. Like we'll say, set a five minute timer for broccoli. And then it goes, five minute timer for broccoli. Oh, that's going to be delicious. Or it should be done just right. And it's like, ugh. And then Lisa, I know, to me it's like, really? But Lisa goes, oh, and she says, thank you, Alexa. And I said, you're very welcome. They have a conversation. Yeah.

[00:24:41] I'm excited about this new sassy because I was getting really fed up with the new Alexa Plus. Yeah. And the sweet. Yeah. And like, I would be like, add peanut butter to the shopping list. Oh, you're going to be making some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Those would be so good. To the moon, Alice. Also, as I say, as a Brit, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is horrible. I don't know why American love this thing so much. This from a guy who eats Marmite. Okay. I love Marmite.

[00:25:11] Love Marmite. But I also love B&J. Oh, exactly. But that's because I'm American and British. I'm both. Julia Child said it's the perfect sandwich. The sweet, nutty flavor of the peanut butter combined. I mean, the nutty, salty flavor of the peanut butter combined. The sweet, fruity flavor of the jelly on the crisp toast is perfect, said Julia Child. No, I'm sorry. Marmite cheese sandwich. That's the way to go. Oh, boy. That's as British as it gets. It is. I'll do both of this. A little too much umami for me, baby.

[00:25:41] Let's take a little break when we come back. But, you know, I like it that we can argue over that. That's better to argue over than social media. It's less consequential anyway. Yeah, it'll be very, it's going to be very interesting to see what the results of this trial are and this resonance. Also Zuckerberg looks so uncomfortable in the stand. Well, you know who else? He almost broke a sweat. You know who else looked uncomfortable? The Doge boys in their depositions. We'll talk about the Doge depositions in just a little bit.

[00:26:10] Boy, was that revelatory. Immediately pulled down, but too bad. Once it's on the internet, it lives forever. 404 did a really good write up of this. They sat through six hours of Doge testimony and I would highly recommend reading that. Save it. Anyway, we'll come back. We'll talk about it because I think it's important, but we will talk about that. Great show. Great panel already kicking things off. The get a little feisty.

[00:26:37] Jennifer Patterson, too, we from the verge in Thompson. Great to have you with your new column at techfinitive. The letter from America too, but it's really not to Brits, right? I mean, it's to everybody. Well, yes, but it's a primarily British site. But at the same time, I think things need explaining to the rest of the world because we're on a very weird place in America. I hope you could explain it to Americans, to be honest. I'd like to know. I'd like to understand.

[00:27:08] Yeah. If you're on the site, where can I find that letter to America? I'm at the techfinitive. Yeah. If you just go to my name on there, just put I-A-I-N. And so... That's the problem. Yeah. There you go. Ian Thompson's letter from America in the style of Alistair Tommy Cook. America is a very strange place at the moment. So, yeah. The more we explain that, the better. Yeah. Because it's losing soft power.

[00:27:36] I think that picture says it all right there. That's the picture. Oh, good God. That was so humiliating to have him, you know... I did love that his son wiped a bogey on the side of the presidential desk. Yeah. And it was just like, wow, this is how far we've come. You know Trump had the Resolute desk removed, steamed, and... Yes. ...and... ...desinfected immediately after. All right. Let's take a little break and we will come back with those.

[00:28:04] Oh, and I forgot to mention Richard Campbell also here. Yes. So nice to have him from Run-A-Z Radio. And, of course, the wonderful Windows Weekly every Wednesday on our... ...this very channel. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN. Now, going online without ExpressVPN, it'd be like... I don't know, leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop. Everyone needs ExpressVPN because every time you connect to an unencrypted network... ...at that coffee shop, at a hotel...

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[00:29:31] That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com. And find out how you can get up to four extra months. ExpressVPN.com. Speaking of Trump, apparently the Trump administration is saying we want $10 billion for brokering the TikTok deal. For brokering it? For brokering it? That's just... Find your feed?

[00:30:01] Yeah. Yeah. I mean... I presume it doesn't go into Trump's pocket. This goes to the Treasury. Or his Kuwaiti bank account. But yeah. I wouldn't assume anything really. Maybe I shouldn't. I mean, 10 years ago... Investors in the US version of TikTok, including Oracle and Silver Lake, agreed to pay the government $10 billion for making them that deal. And you know what?

[00:30:29] They did pay well below what I think everybody considers market value for TikTok for the US operations. I mean, 10 years ago, Leo, I was on the show and I got an awful lot of flack for saying that America has legalized bribery and called it campaign contributions. But in the last couple of years... That's so old fashioned. I know. It's not even campaign anymore. You got a hole in the East Wing. Hey, come on. We'll pour some money into it. Yeah, let's buy your crypto coin. Let's, you know, it's just...

[00:30:59] Would you like an airplane? We can hook you up with an airplane. Oh, I wrote a whole article about that. They're gonna have to strip that plane down to the bare bones to make sure there's, you know... It's gonna cost them billions to make it into... Yeah. It's not gonna save anybody any money. Let's put it that way to make it into Air Force One. It's a gift, you know, or a bribe, whatever you want to call it. As I say, I'm going for citizenship. So I love our maximum leader, Donald Trump. But at the same time, for goodness sake...

[00:31:28] Wall Street Journal says the $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for the government helping a transaction. Nearly. But many point out that the $14 billion these companies paid for the US version of TikTok was well below what its actual value is. Oh, and by the way, they also have to share profits with ByteDance, which owns 19.999%.

[00:31:58] So it's not even out of the hands of Chinese investors, really. Or Chinese security infrastructure. It seems like it's the same old TikTok. Even the algorithm doesn't seem to have changed. Any thoughts on that? I seem to get the same thing a lot more often. Oh, okay. But they're like repeated videos. Like, it's almost like there's less... That's not good. ...less content. Yeah. I'm not a huge TikTok user though, but maybe that's why I don't get much new stuff.

[00:32:27] But yeah, I feel like every time I open the app, I'm getting the same things often. Yeah. Which, yeah, but other than... I mean, there was quite a lot of chatter right after the launch, like the switch over, that there was significant issues and it didn't seem right. But other than that, I mean, the content I see is what I would expect to see. I just keep seeing the same thing over and over again. No truth to the rumor... Which is good for me because it means I turn it off. ...that the 10 bills will be spent on floor shimes for all...

[00:32:58] Floor what? The president gave Marco Rubio some floor shimes. Oh, the shoes! I think he gave the whole cabinet. Oh, the shoes, yes. Okay. And they were a little big. Yeah, and that's the picture that was working. They were kind of like clown shoes. It looks so funny. It's the whole cabinet, by the way. The whole cabinet has to wear these shoes. The whole cabinet. Yeah, I would love shoes. Oh, grief. I mean, I'm sorry, how low your self... We were talking about social media lowering self-esteem. Having to wear outside shoes just to do your job, that's a real lowering of self-esteem.

[00:33:28] It really is. It is. You know what? It's a real power move, isn't it? Mm-hmm. I'm gonna give you some shoes. Make sure you wear those now. It's what Tony Serrano would do. Yeah. You're gonna buy the same shoes, but the right size. Yeah. Like, he's not gonna look that close. Yeah. Well, J.D. Vance told an interesting story where Trump asked Marco Rubio what his shoe size

[00:33:52] was, and he said it was a 7, and then made a joke about shoe size relating to genitalia size. Yeah. It is very small, I might add. A 7 is very small. Which is a line that Rubio used in 2015. That's one of the hand size things. Oh, the hands thing. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. These guys... The level is so low. It's high school. It's so childish. It's really high school. This is not what you expect from your government. I mean, okay, British politics is bad, but it's not this bad.

[00:34:23] Pierce Starmer, really? Well, Nigel Farage, but yeah. Nigel Farage. Boris, with the hair. Oh, God. Don't get me started. I used to work with Boris. Did you really? Boris Johnson, mayor of London, prime minister, funny hair? Yeah. He seemed like he was actually a sweet guy, even though he was a little... What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I was a lowly sort of intern. I worked at The Telegraph when he was at The Telegraph.

[00:34:50] So I only crossed paths with him a couple of times, but he's very funny. Yeah. Actually very smart. He seemed very personal. He was really smart. Yeah. Yeah. And that, but yeah. But I don't know if it's... Going into politics will, you know, do... It'll make you crazy. He's a unique, though, British politician, isn't he? There's such things. Very, yes. Everybody loved him when he was mayor of London, right? Yeah. He was great born there. Yeah. Very popular. It's kind of the Rudy Giuliani of the UK. Like, when it went the other way.

[00:35:20] That's not my praise. Right, but at one point... I do love the anecdote of... Sorry. I do love the anecdote of... Everyone loved him. Sorry. Yeah, no, I mean, I do love the anecdote that his hair was perfectly done, and he went out to a press conference, he was hanging on a second, roughing it all up, and then went out there. It's a very carefully created image. Also a character. It's a look. But yeah, he was great as mayor of London in terms of... Because London's getting a lot of stick at the moment as being a crime-ridden hellhole,

[00:35:49] despite the fact that we've got a lower murder rate than pretty much every American city. But Boris actually boosted London. And you've got too many people just going, oh, London, it's crime, it's terrible, you know. But Boris actually did a lot for the capital. Just not a lot for the country. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Not a great prime minister. A great leader.

[00:36:13] She was at Twitter when Jack decided he wanted to do a little research project on kind of open social networks, funded something that ended up becoming Blue Sky. Jay Graber took the helm. She was CEO. She's now stepping down at Blue Sky. She's going to be the chief innovation officer. But there's...

[00:36:39] One of the investors is going to become temporarily the CEO, Tony Schneider. But they are going to do a CEO search. I do hope they don't ruin Blue Sky. I was going to say, is that everyone's favourite now? Or where are you all? What's your favourite ex-Twitter platform? Richard is shaking his head at this one. Yeah, like there's a favourite. There are, you know... I get a lot of... The tech crowd's on Blue Sky.

[00:37:06] And so I get strong responses for when I'm talking about podcasts there. The real weird geeky guys are on Mastodon, but they're the only ones who can figure out how to do it. Yeah, we run a Mastodon instance, Twitter social, which you're all invited to join. And I love Mastodon. I'm a big fan of the idea of Federation. I'm going to admit kind of a dirty little secret though. Because when Elon bought Twitter, I got off of it immediately. Yeah.

[00:37:35] Because I really realised that it was going to go downhill. And he fired everybody and all sorts of technical issues happened. And then of course the Nazis came in and he brought back a lot of people who really should not have been brought back. But in this age of AI, I have to confess, I'm reading Twitter a lot these days. I don't post there or X. I don't post there. I don't have high hopes for its future now that he has X money.

[00:38:01] You saw that he gave Shatner like 20 bucks of X money and Shatner turned it into $200,000 in charity donations. Wow. Because he sold... Apparently if you give somebody an X money, which it's only in private beta right now. But if you give somebody some money and Elon... I think Elon gave him $42, right? The magic number. And if you give somebody some money, like if you could get somebody to send you a dollar,

[00:38:30] if you get Will Shat to send you a dollar, you would now be in the X money beta. So he was auctioning off a dollar at a time. Elon's $42 raised $200,000 for charity. Excellent. So I think that's actually pretty sharp. That's pretty good. Anyway, it's my dirty little secret is that I do now check because it is where all the AI bros go. It is one way to keep up. I think maybe the best way to keep up with what's going on in a very fast moving arena.

[00:39:00] I mean, in one way it's good and you've got a competitive social media forum. Yes, there's no winner anymore. There is no favorite, right? That's really the answer. It used to be just Twitter. Now you've got Blue Sky, you've got Mastodon, you've got to an extent Reddit and a bunch of other sites. Well, you know what you don't have anymore? Dig. Oh God, this was hilarious. Please go on.

[00:39:24] So, you know, I have a little bit of a, you know, dog in this hunt because Kevin Rose, I worked with him, of course, at Tech TV and he started Dig kind of when he was there and the Dignation podcast. And in some ways I feel responsible for the death of Dig because I was encouraging him to make the changes that ended up becoming Dig 4.0, which turned out to make Dig be the most gameable thing in the world. Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman came along and said we could do a better Dig and created Reddit.

[00:39:53] Dig died because it was being gamed so badly. Reddit won in effect. But Kevin and oddly enough, Alexis Ohanian, Reddit's founder, restarted Dig and they've been public for a few months. They're shutting it down again because they say it's being gamed by bots. Wow. The same reason it shut down last time.

[00:40:23] Two months after their highly anticipated return, Dig announced the site's going offline as a result of a quote unprecedented bot problem. They're going to rejigger it. They thought that AI would solve this, that AI would keep the bots off. But what they underestimated was, as they did last time, was how incentive the bots are and they're using AI too. So they're going to...

[00:40:51] Well, Reddit's facing the same problem at the moment. I mean, it is bot infested. Yeah. I'm on... There's a Reddit thread I'm on called Ask Britz. And, you know, there's a conversation about Tesla. And we got, I don't know about this. Tesla's really popular in the UK. I bought a Model S the other day and it's really, really good. And then directly beneath it, hi, Tesla is underrated. I bought a Model 3 the other day and it was just like, you had to post up bad bot clumsy.

[00:41:21] Bad bot. There's a lot of it. X says it suspended 800 million accounts in 2024 over spam. 800 million. Yeah. I remember when Twitter had 350 million total. I think that was when they sold it to Elon. It was 350 or 400. 800 million, more than double. It suspended several hundred million late last year. This is a, this is what they told UK, the UK. It's according to the Guardian.

[00:41:52] That's a problem. If you're getting that many bots. I mean, they said social media that they told Parliament. Yeah. It was continually fighting state backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network with Russia, the most prolific state actor, followed by Iran and China. It makes you wonder what the operating sites are doing or not doing. Yeah. I mean, if yes, I mean, X has done a lot to try to stop those bots and apparently it's done nothing.

[00:42:22] In fact, well, here's the story from why. The real fake accusation to the old Twitter board is that they weren't managing bots that their accounts were. Right. That was what his whole thing was. His whole pitch. He's like, I gotta fix this. He's a bad job. Clearly didn't do it. Well, you could say in his defense, they banned 800 million of them. Now. Yeah. And they still allowed Stephen Laxley Yellen to get back on there.

[00:42:50] But I mean, look, it's this is a problem with all social media. Bots are everywhere and that needs to be a screening mechanism. But no one's come up with one yet. Remember, of course, that the X was home to a lot of non consensual sexual images and got in a lot of trouble all over the world. It was banned in some countries. They claim to fix that now, according to wired fake AI content about the Iran war is all over X.

[00:43:18] And not only is Grok failing to verify the video correctly, it's creating its own images. They're using Grok to do it. X is AI. The video game war. I mean, right. Well, it is. Look at the administration. Yeah. Horrific, horrendous promo videos using video games and movies. And I've never seen anything like it. I don't know. I mean, remember the the opening stages of Gulf War one.

[00:43:48] Shock and awe. Yeah. Well, when you saw like smart missiles going right down into the bunker and everyone was like, this is absolutely amazing. Now it's AI generated. And it's deeply disturbing because, you know, democracy depends on information. And if it's when you've got the White House putting out AI generated slop, that's really worrying.

[00:44:11] Well, even more worrying to me is that Pete Hegseth and Department of Defense have shooed out all the real journalists from the Pentagon. And the BBC is still there. They've still got a seat there. They agreed. Because it was you had to sign an agreement saying, I'm not going to say anything bad about the Pentagon to stay. The foreign there are foreign press. They're there to sign that it was only domestic. But the BBC did actually hold him to account. Good. And said, right. Okay.

[00:44:37] You said six months ago that their nuclear capability had been destroyed. And now you're saying it's been destroyed again. Can you expand on that? Yeah. It was perfect British passive aggressive. I did love them dearly for that. Well, and Hegseth has excoriated the US media for telling people bad things about the war. Like that's their job, dude. Yeah.

[00:45:02] Now Brendan Carr is threatening to, he's doing his thing where he goes and says things and expects networks to then follow suit without actually doing any regulation. But he has said that he's going to, he's threatening to revoke the licenses of the networks that are portraying the war incorrectly. Because Trump is. Yeah. Not. That was shameful.

[00:45:23] Well, I mean, when I saw that, I went back to an article I'd written, what, 10 years ago, where Brendan Carr was kind of like, you know, we need free speech. We need an open platform. And now he's, now he's in charge. It's just like, yeah, get out. You know? We want free speech for us. Not you. Very much so. Well, call a doctor. Yeah. They even did pull a broadcast license. Nobody uses the airwaves anymore. It's all digital. It's kind of old fashioned anyway.

[00:45:50] I think these are just empty threats because Trump's mad. So he has to make the noise that Trump wants him to make. It's going to punish somebody. Well, they're not empty though, because they, what happens is the networks do act on them because they, because of what's happened. Yeah, that's the real problem. It's like, so there's no actual regulation or enforcement happening here. They're just all running scared because their deals aren't going to go through or, you know. And the experience is when you run, you run, they come get you again. Yeah. And when you say, come at me, bro, they walk away. They walk away.

[00:46:20] The Mark Carney example. Yeah. I mean, Hex has said the quiet part out loud earlier this week. He was just like, once Ellison takes over the CNN, then we'll see some. And it was just like, wow, you're actually saying that. You know, it was. This is how bold they are. They don't have to deny it. They don't have to hide it. But it does speak to the idea that if you actually want to have somebody who was going on in the U.S., you don't look at U.S. media. Yeah. Well, I'm good to know that the Beeb still has somebody in there.

[00:46:50] That's good. Yeah. We've been watching BBC and Sky News now because you can get a feed from both on, I think it's like free as well, like Samsung TV Plus or like all the, what are the free TV streaming services that give you all the channels? And the Sky, because the Beeb's been under a lot of scrutiny recently. Yeah. But Rupert Murdoch owns Sky, right? Yeah. Sky News has always been, I mean, Sky News has always been fairly good.

[00:47:20] I mean, I don't know, Ian, do you ever watch it? At least I can get F1 on Apple TV. No, I mean, I watch Sky News. That's what I care about. I mean, the thing is Murdoch hasn't taken as heavy a hand with Sky News as he has with, for example, The Sun. Right. The Sun, he would call the editor every day and discuss what they were going to put on the front page. Sky News has got some really good journalists. They've got some really good coverage. You know, the same thing for The Wall Street Journal. You could say the same thing for The Wall Street Journal. Yeah.

[00:47:47] You know, the editorial board might have some, a slant, but the reporting is very good. The people are very good there. But it's harder and harder to find news that you feel confident in these days. Well, and that's why maybe the real issue with social media is that's where a whole generation gets its news now. I mean, yeah, they get their news from TikTok and Instagram. I had a bit of a retro moment. That's for people my age. Although they actually get news because I remember being that age and never watching the news.

[00:48:17] My daughter says, you know, we, we, if she's 32, so she's not quite in that generation. But she says, we use TikTok for search. I said, you can't use TikTok for search. She said, well, ask a question. How long is the Golden Gate Bridge? I said, she said, enter into TikTok and I found it. So you actually can't use TikTok for search. There's so much content on there. Don't ask it when TNM swear happens also, but you do get the answer. Yeah.

[00:48:44] Speaking of problems with Avocado, Meta's AI, Elon Musk has been firing people at XAI saying it was not built right. To his satisfaction. It's not built right. It's interesting because, you know, chat GPT, OpenAI and Anthropics Claude are dominating. In fact, the Chinese open AIs like DeepSeek and QN also very, very good.

[00:49:10] But for some reason, Meta and X are having trouble with their AIs getting it to do anything. Maybe the standard is so good. X has been losing people of the 12 people who founded the company XAI in 2023. Of 12 who founded the company three years ago, only two are left. Last month, some significant departures, quite a few.

[00:49:36] At an all hands meeting last month, Musk said, these are deliberate exits. Some people are better suited for the early stages and less suited for the later stages. Electric says this is a problem. You know, so X is making money in one company. Elon's making money in one company, SpaceX, losing money massively on XAI and losing money on X.

[00:50:06] So what's the solution? You put them all together and you have a SpaceX stock IPO. That's a man that's a hell of a drug. Yeah, no kidding. But it's also a fairly clever movement. None of them are public companies. Not now. He gets to do what he wants. Yeah, he took X private. We took Twitter private when he bought it. Right. So, you know, you don't actually even know the truth, which means it's probably worse than you think. But it's a great way to hide problems. Right.

[00:50:34] His whole plan is to take Tesla SpaceX, XAI, X, Neuralink, the boring company, mush them all into a big ball. I don't think he's going to get Tesla in there because Tesla is public. Tesla's public. That's right. That's right. There's much more regulation and trouble around all of that. But he's already munged the rest together. He is treating Tesla though as kind of a resource. He's moved AI engineers from Tesla to XAI and so forth.

[00:51:01] And he's mostly borrowed against Tesla stock, right? He's deeply leveraged in the next Tesla stock. That's the nature of billionaires, right? You only, you just borrow money against your stock. Right. So you never have taxes. Right. And it's all well and fine to you to take your stock price. Yeah. We've seen this also in the rest of the industry where you've got Oracle investing in NVIDIA to get, you know, stuff from them. A whole bunch of companies investing in NVIDIA to...

[00:51:28] And then NVIDIA investing back because this is... Exactly. It's a massive... You buy our chips with our money that we're going to give you. Well, exactly. I mean, financially, it's a Chinese military parade of red flags. You would not touch these things. And yeah, it's going to be very interesting to see how that works out. Well, tomorrow NVIDIA has a big, big shoe. We're going to talk about that in just a little bit. I know you're excited about that and you've been doing some prep work, Ian. And I know Richard Campbell also have things to say about that.

[00:51:57] I said this on Windows Weekly. It's like, wow, you weren't happy selling shovels. So now you're going to go try and get some gold. Really? That's right. Going for the gold. Jennifer Patterson too. He's also here. We will talk about GTC in just a little bit. This Week in Tech brought to you this week by Modulate. This is actually a really cool company. They started first with video gaming, trying to get the abuse down in video gaming. And now they're expanding.

[00:52:24] Everyday enterprises generate millions of minutes of voice traffic, customer calls, agent conversations, fraud attempts. And most of that audio ends up just being treated like text. It's flattened into a transcript. There's no, you know, tone intent. The risk even kind of is watered down because it's just words on paper. Modulate exists to change that. They did it in gaming. Their technology supported major players like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.

[00:52:54] There's also all that voice, right, going on during these massively multiplayer games. They've been using their specially designed AI models to separate playful banter from intentional harm. And they're doing it at scale with millions of players simultaneously. Today, Modulate is also helping enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, understand 20 million minutes of voice every day.

[00:53:22] By not as a transcript, but listening to interpreting what was said and what it actually means in the real world. It's a very special model. It's Modulate's newest ELM, they call it. And I love the name Velma 2.0 with a little nod, I think, to Scooby Doo. Velma, that's the smart one, right? The one with the glasses. Velma is a voice native behavior. This is so cool.

[00:53:46] It's a voice native behavior aware model that was designed and built to understand real conversations, not just transcripts. It orchestrates 100 plus specialized models, each focused on a different aspect of voice analysis. And the result is you get accurate, explainable insights in real time. You got to check this out.

[00:54:08] Velma ranks number one across four key audio benchmarks, beating all large foundation models in accuracy, cost and speed. It's number one in conversation understanding because it's designed to do this, right? Number one in transcription accuracy and cost. Number one, you need this in deep fake detection. And number one, this is the one I really am amazed by, in emotion detection.

[00:54:36] Built on 21 billion minutes of audio, Velma is 100 times faster, cheaper and more accurate than LLMs. Because it's tuned for this, right? An understanding speech. Better than Google, Gemini, OpenAI, better than XAI. Most LLMs are a black box. Velma doesn't just assess a conversation as a whole, but breaks it down for greater accuracy and transparency. It produces time-stamped scores and events tied to moments in the conversation.

[00:55:06] So you can see exactly when the risk is going up, when behavior shifts or the intent changes. You can see it right there. With Velma, you can improve your customer experiences, reduce risks like fraud and harassment, detect rogue agents and so much more. Go beyond transcripts. See what a voice-native AI model can really do. You know what? You can actually check it out. Go to Modulate's live, ungated preview of Velma.

[00:55:35] It's at preview.modulate.ai. That's preview.modulate.ai to see why Velma ranks number one in all leading benchmarks for conversation, understanding, deep fake detection and emotion detection. Very cool stuff. Preview.modulate.ai. We are entering very interesting times, I have to say, with AI. Very, very interesting times.

[00:56:04] So, what? Well, the UK is changing the, the Bank of England is changing the faces on banknotes. No more Churchill on your banknotes? Yeah, but everyone's like, oh, that's so woke. But at the same time, they're taking Alan Turing, famous homosexual war hero off the 50-quid note. And I was talking with someone on Reddit about this and it was just like, they're putting badges on the notes. It's just like, I would pay money to see Alan Turing on the back of a badger.

[00:56:34] And somebody just created an AI picture of that and posted it up. Is it very good? It's pretty damn good. I like the idea of wildlife on your bills. I think that's kind of neat. And the British bills are very colorful, right? The banknotes. Oh yeah, we have fun with it. You know. They're quite pretty. Here's a- Although now you have the Donald Trump dollar coin coming. Um, and the, uh, so first sitting president who's actually put his name on the, his face on the currency.

[00:57:02] I think though, to be fair, that isn't intended as regular currency. That is like, you know, a special. I was gonna say who, who actually uses dollar coins. Right. I mean, I've, I've got very few of them. It sells those. It's more like, um, you know, a New Jersey. Yeah. It's a special thing. New Jersey transit uses the, uh, the coin. So they, they're going to put badgers on them. Uh, they're going to put a whole bunch of wildlife on them. Um, now King Charles is still on the front.

[00:57:32] Uh, uh, presumably so I haven't held a UK banknote for over two years. So Jennifer, sorry. I've probably got one right here. Actually. Um, I, I was just, I was just in, um, Costa Rica and they have animals on their banknotes. I like that idea. I have some, they're beautiful. Um, because, and they have like a little thing. This is, this is a UK. This is a British banknote. So there's- See how pretty that is. There's, there's a QE2. Beautiful. This is who's, I don't, I don't know who that is. That's Jane Austen. I don't know.

[00:58:02] No. Who is that? It's a man. It's a guy. Look at our beautiful colorless green banknotes, right? Joseph Mallard William Turner. Oh, Joe Turner, old Joe Turner. Sure. But the Costa Rican ones, they have like, uh, sloths and monkeys. And when you put them together like this, they have like a little, um, I should go get it. It's much better than bending the queen's head.

[00:58:28] But, um, the flowers come together to form the flower of the region that you're in. It's like, it's really neat kind of little Easter egg things. Um, and there, there's a, their banknotes are like yellow and green and blue and, um, much more colorful than ours. But yeah, I agree. US money is really boring. It's really, but let's be fair. Who uses cash anymore? Or, or do you? I get cash. I go to the bank and get cash, but mostly it's for tips. Cause I like the tip and cash.

[00:58:56] No, I, our local banh mi place only takes cash. Well, it's getting more expensive. That means they're money laundering. I know that, right? No, no, I'm, I'm sorry. This guy's been doing it for 30 years. He does the best banh mi on the planet. Well, it's probably worth it. It's, it's, it's a Vietnamese guy and he's, it's a family owned business, but they only take cash because why would you pay two to 3%? Yeah. And it's getting more and more expensive for companies to use for retailers to use.

[00:59:23] So like you, when you do see this in LA and California, we see this in the Southeast all the time. You go into a restaurant or a shop and if you pay by card, any card, even debit card, there's a 3% charge on your bill. So that I think we'll be nice. It pays that. Yeah. No, but you, you're paying 3% more. You pay it. Yes. They're like, if you're going to pay by card, even debit card, your bills are going to 3% more.

[00:59:51] To say that it's cheaper if you pay cash. The gas stations do it too. Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. No, if you, if you buy, you know, but if you buy petrol, then it's much, it's, it's significantly cheaper to pay with cash. This is how it used to be though, right? Like they're used to always pass on the credit charge to the person. Right. Isn't that how it used to be? Just mark everything up 3%. I mean, they, they may be secretly doing that. Yes. But you're supposed to have this. I think I, maybe I'm wrong, but I think I remember that you were supposed to have the

[01:00:19] same price for cash or credit that you weren't supposed to have separate prices. I'm just surprised that they do it that way rather than just mark it up and say 3% discount for cash. Right. Much more positive. Yeah. Yeah. I just, you know, I don't know what cat gas costs in your foreign lands, but here in California, it is six bucks a gallon in Petaluma now. Oh yeah. Oh, ours just went up, but it's nowhere near that. Yeah. Well, we, we pay more in California because of tax. Uh, yeah.

[01:00:48] And also California requires that the petroleum petrol, as you would say, gets refined in the state, which costs more. Well, also, I mean, there's less pollutants, but yeah, SF standard had a thing. They found $6 50, uh, the most expensive gas on in San Francisco. Oh wow. It was weird because I posted a picture up, you know, big sir route one. If you've ever driven down there, it's a fantastic driving road, but the, there are only two petrol stations and they screw you so hard. Yeah.

[01:01:17] Cause where else are you gonna go? You're on. Yeah. Exactly. So I took a picture of their gas prices and it was five 50. And now that just looks sweet. Oh, and by the way, on the discord channel, uh, club twit, I've just posted a picture of Alan Turing riding a badger. Yeah. And it's well, now I've got to join the club. That's for sure. That's worth it. That's worth your, your club membership right there. Let me see if I can pull it up here. These English badgers are so much sweeter than North American badgers. North American badger.

[01:01:48] Terrifying. Badger, badger, badger. I mean, that is a beautiful image. It is. He's so small and the badger is so big. The great badger. And British people of a certain age will recognize the meme badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger. What was it? What was it? And then it would go mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, badger, badger. That's but that was universal. That was worldwide.

[01:02:13] Badger, badger, badger, badger. I did very well. A mere single digits. Wow. Well, no, but I'm Jennifer is a Brit. As a fellow Brit, you can understand this.

[01:02:39] When I first came over here and I was talking to the taxi driver on the way back from the airport about British petrol prices. He was like, hang on, you're paying $11 a gallon. I was about to say it's a lot more expensive in England. Yeah. They hide it though, by putting it in liters, which. Yes. It's harder to tell. Yeah. It's harder to tell. It took me a while to figure out that. I was like, oh wow, it's a bargain here. And down here in the south, it's $3.50 right now. But like a month ago, it was $2.70.

[01:03:07] So we've had a huge, like overnight, two weekends ago, it went up. And of course, those prices. Was it $2.70 in California since like 20 years ago? Yeah. We haven't seen $2.70 in ages, but it all trickles down too, because truckers, all the food you have, you eat everything. Everything gets to that. Yeah. I don't even know what the price is because I pay with electricity. Yeah, me too. Me too. I'm all electric. Look.

[01:03:33] So tomorrow, NVIDIA will begin GTC, its annual conference, and Jensen Wong will do the keynote. We will be covering it. Jeff Jarvis, Micah Sargent, and I will be turning on our cameras at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1900 UTC to, I'm sorry, 1800 UTC to show a Jensen's leather jacket. And apparently they're going to have some, I think they're going to have some big announcements.

[01:03:59] I think this is really maybe the most important GTC keynote ever. NVIDIA is of course in the cutting edge of AI development. One of the things that they're going to announce is Nemo Claw, which is an AI agent like OpenClaw, but they say will be more secure. They've been talking about this, I think for a while. I think this is a big surprise, but we haven't seen it yet. And well, it's not hard to be more secure than OpenClaw.

[01:04:29] I know. They also say that it will not require CUDA, which is of course NVIDIA's proprietary language. It requires an NVIDIA GPU, which means I guess you'll be able to run it on non-NVIDIA hardware. We'll see. The NVIDIA hardware is actually appreciating in value. I saw a story. You can buy H100 cards, they're old GPUs, but they cost more than they did three years ago when they came out.

[01:04:58] So if you invested better than buying $2 bills, buy NVIDIA GPUs. They also, according to the Wall Street Journal, plan to reveal a new chip system for inference computing that will incorporate a chip designed by Grok, not Grok, Elon's Grok with a K, Grok with a Q. NVIDIA licensed the design from them last year.

[01:05:24] So they just announced the new platform, the Vera Rubin platform, a few months ago. So they're moving very, very fast. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what Jensen announces. You're going to watch that, right, Ian? You said you were... Yeah, no, I was out with some analysts last night. And they were talking about this. And NVIDIA has really got to take the market by the throat at this point, because its stock is massively overvalued. Yeah.

[01:05:53] NVIDIA is the Straits of Hormuz of AI. That's a very... I might steal that actually. But I mean, on one level, it's kind of like everyone's waiting for the bubbles to pop. You know, and what's going to happen to NVIDIA when that happens. So I think NVIDIA is getting its defense in first. And some of these new announcements look really, really good.

[01:06:17] But I think fundamentally, talking to NVIDIA and talking to the analysts behind it, there's going to be a bubble bursting. And then they take over and try and salvage something from the wreckage. But they're actually in a pretty good position. The open source AI, Jim, in particular, is getting a lot of attention. Because it's like, okay, you're actually opening this up.

[01:06:43] And that's going to bugger up some of their, you know, commercial competition. But they're willing to do it. I have to say the frontier AIs are still ahead by a long shot. There's nothing like Claude. In fact, one of the things Anthropic announced this week is Opus 4.6, their frontier model, now has a million token context window up five times from its 200,000.

[01:07:09] That means it can ingest much more data and work on it without choking. That's a huge leap. Nothing close with the open platforms. I'm with you. I think we need open platforms. I think they're really important. We don't want a handful of companies to dominate this. Go ahead, Richard. Yeah, you used to have to pay a premium to get the million thing. Like I have a bunch of friends who own, who pay for a number of max accounts because they're software developers. They're literally running these things against each other.

[01:07:39] And a bunch of them are paying the premium for the million. And now they've opened it up, which to me, you know, Anthropic's so far ahead on the efficiency equation that I think they're finding out, okay, we can make this make economic sense too. I think that must be it. They also announced that they're going to give you a double the usage at off peak hours. So they, you know, everybody's been talking about it and maybe they're doing this at a great loss. I don't know.

[01:08:06] Ed Zittrain and others are talking about how much Anthropic is losing on every single token they sell. I don't know if that's the case. We just don't know how much it costs. We argue about the max accounts can't continue because, you know, $200 a month and all you can eat is kind of nuts. It's not exactly all you can eat. You can run out, but I have not. I paid $200 because I get that much value out of it. I find it. And I have friends who, if it was a thousand, they'd be paying too. Like they are knocking it. Well, that's what I'm afraid of. I think they're hooking me.

[01:08:38] And we're back to social media. Social media. Honestly, I probably would pay more because I'm so tied into the ecosystem. I briefly when chat GPT 5.4 came out, I thought, oh, I got to try this. This is supposed to be better. Codex is supposed to be better and I got to try it. And I moved everything over and I felt like I was breaking up with my girlfriend. It was very difficult. But the issue.

[01:09:04] The thing that's interesting about the token limit issue is one of the things we're doing very heavily in software is breaking down into small pieces to stay under the token limits. Right. Because we get better quality. A, if you overflow, you have problems anyway. But in general, people are well even under the quarter million because you get better quality code when you take a smaller byte. All I know is I have a little progress bar as I'm working that shows how much of the context I've used. And it used to fill up pretty quickly.

[01:09:34] Yeah.

[01:10:04] And so forth. But now I can't. I mean, I'm looking at that bar. It doesn't move. It's like, it's amazing. It's very hard to fill up a million tokens. The question, Leo, is what is this worth to you then? How much, what's the absolute limit you would pay for this? What will you pay? Don't test me. That's all I'm saying. Please don't test me. Does that square with how much Anthropix spends on it? That's the arithmetic that needs to work. First of all, we don't know how much it costs them. That's the map that needs to work. And there is definitely some efficiencies that they're gaining, obviously.

[01:10:35] Well, for instance, Nvidia said the Vero Rubin platform is, I forgot what it was, but it was like 10 times less cost than their H200s. I mean, they're making massive improvements in efficiency. We just don't know. We don't know if it's a money loser or what. I mean, that's always been the contention is that for 200 bucks a month, you're getting thousands of dollars. But Anthropix seems to be the company accelerating away. They are. They're dropping new things out.

[01:11:03] This was always a conversation early on, which is like, what happens when these companies use their own tools to improve their tools? And that's what they're doing. And that's what we're seeing. More so than any other, they seem to be suddenly accelerating away from everyone. Well, I mean, it's also kind of a grudge match because Anthropix was founded by people that looked at OpenAI and went bugger that, we're doing our own thing. And they're stealing the march on them at the moment. They really are.

[01:11:30] I mean, with OpenAI in particular just dying on its backside amongst users because of the political stances they've taken, Anthropix is saying, looking at that and going, yeah, let's get in there. Here's an interesting story. I'm very curious what you think about this. You are, of course, familiar with perplexity. They have shopping bots on perplexity. You can say, I want to buy some running shoes, trainers in your parlance.

[01:12:01] And I have to remember we're doing foreign language programming now. And so you want to buy some, or maybe you want to buy a jumper, sweaters as we call them. And which, you know what? Jumper is a much more civilized way to talk about it than sweater. More Aussie too. Yeah. Yeah. So let's say you're shopping for a bicycle. You call it a bicycle, right? So you're shopping for a bicycle and perplexity. It will then show you a bunch of sites. You can even say, buy me a bicycle.

[01:12:28] You could say perplexity, do the research, get me the best running shoes money can buy. Your budget is 200 bucks or whatever. And it will buy them. Well, Amazon didn't like that too much. This is using the perplexity browser Comet, which is agentic. Amazon didn't like that too much. They sued last November, demanding that they stop making purchases for users online. This week, a judge ruled in favor of Amazon.

[01:12:58] It's a temporary injunction, but they said that perplexity's Comet can no longer buy stuff from Amazon's website. Judge Maxine Chesney. It does undermine Amazon's model of selling you their stuff, right? Exactly. Well, it underlines a couple of things. Amazon also has ads on their site, right? And they make a huge amount of money from the ads. But they also, yeah, Amazon recommends. Amazon suggests it. And you don't see any of that if you're using a bot.

[01:13:28] You don't see Amazon's site if you're using a bot. The judge said Amazon has provided strong evidence that perplexity's Comet browser accessed its website at the user's direction, but without authorization from Amazon. When did I have to get authorization to use a website? Yeah. As a human, do I have to get authorization? Well, I mean, as Richard said, Amazon... I'm sorry. I was going to say their argument probably is you have to have an account, right, to buy something on Amazon. It's on the internet.

[01:13:58] Well, but I presume that Comet is using my money with my account. And that's where the argument falls down. It's like you've given it authorization. So yeah, they don't have... And the irony here is this is exactly what Amazon is trying to do with Alexa Plus. Exactly. And Rufus, which very few people know about, but Amazon has an AI agent on its site. Its own AI agent. And they want you to use Rufus.

[01:14:22] Although, in a related story, Amazon had an all hands with its engineers who they said, you can't use Claude. You have to use Cairo, our in-house AI, to do your engineering. They had an all hands saying, you cannot use any of our code that you've produced with Cairo without getting a senior engineer to sign off on it. Wow. Because apparently, it's been causing some problems. They now deny. Well, they had that massive outage. They deny.

[01:14:50] First, they said it was caused by AI. Yeah. Now they're saying, oh, no, no, no, no. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't AI. But I've got a bridge here. I could sell you if you believe that. But yeah. They say, please don't use our AI to solve your technical problems. Yeah. I mean, don't you, when you're, when I'm using Chrome and I go to Amazon and I'm buying something, I'm using Chrome to buy something on my account with my permission.

[01:15:19] How is that different? I think the judge got this wrong. Yeah. And this is something that my, our esteemed editor in chief, Nilay Patel at The Verge has been hammering on about AI agents since day one. He calls it the DoorDash problem, which is that basically the whole point of agentic AI is to circumvent the, the place that the Amazon or the DoorDash, like the place where you're going to go to buy the thing or the Uber.

[01:15:46] And the, you know, so that service is no longer going to get users coming to it, just like news organizations are no longer getting users coming to it because AI is just summarizing their, their information and spitting out. If you can do everything with AI, what happens to the services that you're using because you are no longer using them yourself and these agentic tools are going there for you. And this is like what rabbit was trying to do.

[01:16:15] This is what all of, yeah, this is what all of this is, you know, this is sort of the goal of a lot of the current agent agentic AI out there. Alexa plus I'm sure with Gemini and there's, they just actually, I did drop this link in the show notes, but Gemini just launched this, this week on the new Samsung device. You can use a task automation with Gemini.

[01:16:42] So you can get Gemini to do your, order your Uber or they launched with Uber and one other feature. But yeah, what's going to happen? This is on the new S26 Ultra. Yes. It's just there now, but eventually I'm sure we'll see it go to all of the phones that support Gemini. So what happens to them? How many different AI agents on your Samsung phone? You've got Bixby, right? They don't discriminate Samsung. They're open to everyone. But it is only a temporary injunction, right?

[01:17:11] Which really is, is this a case? Is it repropriate? Is it causing harm? Like then you get the injunction. Yeah, yeah. The judge will probably lose on the actual case. I hope so. Well, because it blows the whole thing up if they do. Although the judge said the court finds Amazon has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim.

[01:17:29] Amazon said, they kind of admitted what we've been saying, that perplexities agents, first they said, well, it's a security risk because it can act using private customer accounts without requiring a password. It's us. But then they admitted it. They said perplexities agents created challenges for the company's advertising business.

[01:17:54] Because when AI systems generate ad traffic, the impressions have to be, we have to figure out if it's an AI before we can build the advertisers. This requires a lot of the case. It's a business model. It's a flawed business model, dude. We're not going to figure out this. The system adaptations are necessary to maintain contractual obligations with advertisers who pay only for legitimate human impressions. Yeah. Hmm.

[01:18:19] I mean, it's an interesting case because it is what goes to the core of what's going to happen. I mean, no one's sad about Amazon. No. But we are sad about our news websites that no longer get any traffic to them. So eventually we'll shut down and we will no longer have originally reported news and AI will just have to make up more stuff because there won't be any original content out there. And we are, you know, we are sad.

[01:18:43] Like we're seeing different, like smaller businesses that managed to do well on the Internet, you know, getting disintermediated. And that type of thing is what AI is, I mean, AI is coming for everyone's jobs as we keep being warned. In fact, there's a great piece in The Verge this week about people whose jobs are going to be lost by AI. But AI is going to completely change the Internet and completely change the business models of every website out there.

[01:19:09] So, I mean, Amazon, like I said, no boo-hoo's here for them, but we've got to start the fight somewhere. I mean, there's, I mean, you're right. And the same thing happened to restaurants and it's been really hard on restaurants, you know, that without asking the restaurant's permission, companies like, was it Uber Eats or DoorDash? DoorDash did that, that they would sign up restaurants without their permission and take a commission from it. Yeah.

[01:19:39] You know, it's- So I understand if I were a small restaurant owner or my son, for instance, who is a small restaurant owner in New York, those guys could kill you. Imagine, you know, all of a sudden you get an order for a hundred French dip sandwiches, you know, and you've got customers waiting in the store, but you've got to fulfill these customers' orders and you didn't even sign up for it. I mean, this is what Amazon did to literally every brick and mortar store. That's a good point. You started at Amazon. I know, don't cry for Amazon. Don't cry for Amazon.

[01:20:09] It's a very, very good point. Yeah. Come to think of it. I didn't, I wasn't even thinking about that. Let's see. All right. Let's take a break and then we will talk more about Doge and the, the amazing Doge deposition videos. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Great panel. This is fun. And we're, and we're moving along, Jennifer, because we're going to get you the Oscars start soon and we're going to get you out. I've been peeking at the dresses.

[01:20:39] There's some good ones. Yes. Right now it's red carpet time. Yeah. You want to be an hour late. You want to be an hour late anyway. So when you skip the ads, you basically catch up to live once you've skipped all the ads. I know. It's kind of like an American football game in that respect, you know, skip over the ads. And this is what really makes me mad about social media. Forget all this about making our kids crazy. I have to. Spoiled. Yeah. I don't want to see any spoilers because it's coming across and it's on my phone. It's on my watch. It's everywhere. Oh my God. Yeah, exactly.

[01:21:08] The same problem last night. The Chinese Grand Prix run at midnight and I had to turn my phone off. Turn everything to make sure I didn't get spoilers. By the way, are we not loving the new era of Formula One Ian? I am iffy about it. Oh, it's so exciting. No, you see, I'm sorry. I've been watching Formula One for 40 years. And in my mind, when you're driving a Formula One car, it's balls to the floor go as fast as you can.

[01:21:38] And now you've got to recharge the battery. Now it's a chess game. You've got to manage this. It's more like Mario Kart. A lot of drivers have said it's exactly like Mario Kart because if you charge the battery enough, you get a magic mushroom and you go much faster. You've got to know when to let the banana go. Absolutely. Yeah. No, it is. It's much more complicated. But you know what? This is a generation of drivers. They're all like 20 that grew up on Mario Kart. They've played, you know, this is a video game to them. Yeah.

[01:22:07] I mean, I think this is why we're going to lose Max Verstappen by the end of the season because he's just not enjoying it at all. Yeah, because he's not winning at all. This is one of the reasons I like it. It's because three plus G's in these turns like you. Oh, yeah. You're waiting to the to the drive. Like it's really. These guys, you've got a you've got a 30 pound helmet on your head as well, which is being forced to the side. So, yeah, I have the hands device. So they just they need those things. But, you know, the reality is we haven't been going faster for a long time because you can't keep the driver safe. Yeah.

[01:22:37] Like true. I mean, a long time ago, they could be 300 mile an hour cars. Just everybody would die. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Well, that's it's much safer than it used to be. Much. Well, yeah. I mean, it's kind of like the Group B rally series in the 80s where they basically said, you know, let's take all the regulations out. And yeah, a lot of drivers are killed. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Do you like Apple's new? I do. The thing I don't like is they added a lot of ads.

[01:23:04] All of a sudden there's ads on F1, which I don't like at all. I paid a lot more money, though, for the F1 TV subscription. So I guess that's. Well, I mean, F1 TV, I think, was about. I think I got 90 bucks a year last year. And I'm fine with that. If it means no adverts and I can get the British commentators, I'm down with that. Yeah. We still. The good news is we still get the F1 TV commentators. You still get crafty if you want crafty. And crafty is losing a bit. But I do like Martin Brundle. No one can do a fast lap like Martin Brundle.

[01:23:33] I like the Scottish guy, David Clouthard. He is. Oh, yeah. On the on the main feed. DC is fantastic. You know, and he's he's very sarky. And when you get Nico Rosberg doing commentating, highly recommend it. Yeah, because he is snarky as all hell. And I do like his commentary. I'm sorry. We got started talking about. Sorry. Yeah. Never start us on F1. Ian and I will go on and on and on. All right. We're going to we're going to take a break. Come back.

[01:24:03] Let's talk about Doge when we come back. Jennifer Patterson Tui, who has Costa Rican money. Did you have a good time in Costa Rica? I'm so jealous. Oh, it was amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It was my it was our 20th wedding anniversary and we had gone there. Oh, congratulations. We had. Thank you. We had gone there for our honeymoon. So we came back and we brought our kids with us. So and to the exact same place. And it was the Osa Peninsula. It's like the remotest part of Costa Rica. You can you can get to really.

[01:24:32] So it's funny because I know many people go there, but everybody has a different reason for going. You have the Atlantic, you have the Pacific, you have the jungle. Well, it's all different things. Yeah. This is the rainforest. Like, so we were deep in the jungle. So it was like boomers and monkeys and toucans and coaties and everything. We saw all the wildlife in the house. Actually, you know, we were in a house like an Airbnb, but it had no walls. Okay. I don't like that. Okay. We did that once in Mexico. We got what they call a palapa.

[01:25:02] And when I saw that the whatever monkeys had nibbled the soap, I said, we're moving. I'm not staying here. But to be fair, our firstborn was like six months old. So I didn't want them to nibble our six month old. Yeah. Yeah. I can understand. But it was, it was like, it was like being in there. That is wild. They were coming in the house. Yeah. And the raccoons came in the house. Oh no. Which, which they warned us this.

[01:25:30] And I said to my husband, well, there's like one part of the house that's like a big, almost like a safe with a big heavy door. So they, they put all the like, electric things in there. That's a sign. And it's like, we should put the food in there and the trash. And so he diligently one night packed everything into there and then forgot to shut the door. Oh no. Raccoons are not so dumb, are they? One raccoon came and then five more. He's like, he went and got his, the rest of his family. Hey guys, they forgot to close the door. Come on.

[01:25:59] And the raccoons in Costa Rica are not like the ones in the U S which interesting side note are apparently becoming domesticized, domesticated, which is very interesting. But the ones in Costa Rica are huge. And this one stood up on its back on its hind legs. And cause I went down to shoo them away and it stood up at hind legs and it was as tall as me. What? I'm five foot 10. What? Yeah. They're big. These are Cotamundis, right? They were not. No, no. It was an actual raccoon, but it did. I know what you mean about it.

[01:26:28] It almost looked like a cross between the Cotees and the raccoons. It was that big? Yeah. On its hind legs. Yeah. I was like, hmm. Oh, that's terrifying. You can have the bread. Did it try to wash you? No, I mean, as a fellow Brit, I find trash pandas absolutely terrifying cause they have no fear whatsoever. No. It's just like, if you see them on the street, they're just like, stand up on the hind legs and go, yeah, you want some? You know, I mean.

[01:26:58] Oh my God. And I mean, urban raccoons bulk up to fight dogs and they're quite assertive. Yeah. I live in bear country. You simply do not leave anything edible outside. Like, no, stop. They will go through it all. Well, I should have known this palapa in Mexico, the bed didn't have feet. It was hanging from the ceiling. And I, that should have been a giveaway that there was something that might crawl up a bed leg. And so we're just going to hang it from the ceiling.

[01:27:25] I'm going to say the bear thing does terrify me cause I went camping up in, um, up in the Sierras and my wife woke me up in the middle of the night just cause there were bears prowling around our tent. And yeah, we've done the thing. We put the food in a bear box and the rest of it. Yeah. But she's just like, isn't that amazing? It's like, there are two thin layers of nylon between me and huge sharp pointy teeth. Oh yeah. Not something I'm enjoying. No. Yeah.

[01:27:53] And they like toothpaste too. Don't bring the toothpaste in your tent. Like. Oh, that I hadn't heard. I mean, they, the, the, the thing the, the guide told us was if it's brown laid down, if it's black attack and it's just like, I know I'm going to die thinking, well, it's kind of brown. Is it a blue dress? Is it a black dress? I don't know. My husband was a fishing guide in Alaska for four summers and he once was cleaning

[01:28:20] fish on the end of a dock and, um, a one, a huge big brown bear who had hurt paw came onto the dock. It was like, Oh, you look like a big fish. Would you like a fish? Would you like dinner? Thankfully. Thankfully he had a radio on him, but the bear was going right for him. He knew he wanted. Yeah. So it's, they're pretty scary creatures. They're great to view from a distance, a very safe distance. Richard's quite the fisherman.

[01:28:48] Well, I mean, I had a, I've lived with him my whole life, so I'm not that anxious about it, but you don't mess with brown bears. Brown bears are serious business. Yeah. An old schoolmate of mine, uh, worked on Svalbard, uh, in the Arctic circle for a couple of years. And then you're not a whole other league. Yeah, exactly. You're, you're not allowed out of the town unless you've got a gun on you because they will, you know, polar bears are just like, Ooh, crunchy. Well, and it's also a big deal.

[01:29:16] If you do show to polar bear, like that's your mistake. Like we did the expedition out of Svalbard and it's like, yeah, checked very carefully. There was no bear around because they're in danger. And if you shoot one now, you have a lot of paperwork to do. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Uh, we're taking a little break. Come back. You can't get your head around how big a polar bear is. Like you, you can't get your head around how big a polar bear is. Like you, you can't get your head around how big a polar bear is. I'm not sure I want to. Oh, no. Thank you very much. Massive. Just a different league. As big as a Kutamunday. They yank whales out of the water. Yeah.

[01:29:46] Wow. Yes. David Attenborough had a marvelous series on, on, on the life in ice thing where yeah, they're literally hanging around the, well, the whales will come up to breathe and then just yank them up. Rip them out. Yeah. We've got food. Yeah. Snack time. The only time polar bears are fun to look at is when they're so stuffed full of whale they can't even move. Now they're on the money. Uh, we are, uh, talking to, uh, the Commonwealth version of this week in tech, Richard Campbell

[01:30:14] from Madera park, British Columbia in Thompson. He's visiting San Francisco, but he really is an Irishman. Well, Irishman Scots, please. I thought you said Ireland. I know. I always thought you were Scots. No, no, I'm half Scott and half Yorkshire, which makes me the tightest person on the planet. But, um, Jennifer will understand. There's only one type cheaper than the York Sherman and that's a Scott. Yes.

[01:30:41] Well, this is how, this is how copper wire was invented to Yorkshiremen fighting over a penny. Ah, wow. And, uh, Jennifer Patterson Tui from the verge. Great to have all three of you here. Our show today brought to you by Monarch. I know I'm not supposed to talk about competition when I talk about Monarch, but I gotta tell you my subscription, uh, recently. Okay.

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[01:34:14] That's 50% off at Monarch.com code TWIT. There was no question in my mind. Monarch is worth every penny. I love Monarch. So, of course, the big story this week was a whistleblower that says one of the Doge engineers in the Social Security database copied records from 500 million people. That's more than there are in the United States. So, I guess 500 million records maybe.

[01:34:44] He possessed two databases from the Social Security Administration, Numadent and the Master Death File. The whistleblower said the person asked for help transferring the databases from a thumb drive to his personal computer so he could, quote, sanitize the data before using it at a company he was going to. He is currently employed.

[01:35:11] This is exactly what we were worried about, to be honest. When these kids, these 20-somethings, got brought into government, the Social Security Inspector's General Office is investigating this. It is a credible story. And the guy who took 500 million records for, I guess, living and dead Americans, that's why there's so many of them, includes Social Security numbers,

[01:35:40] places and dates of birth, citizenship, race, ethnicity, parents' names. And we know who it is because it's been revealed. And we know he went to a company that works with the Social Security. He had essentially unrestricted God-level security access to the Social Security Administration systems. These are databases that, until now, have been treated as highly secure, highly private.

[01:36:10] The government expects us to give them all the information every year when we file our tax returns. In return, we expect them to keep it private. Yeah, how's that working out? You know what I mean? It's just like, you let a bunch of... I mean, we'll talk about this later, but you look at the people that were behind this, and you know it's just like they would instantly take this. Because it's a fantastic data. Why wouldn't you?

[01:36:41] But yeah, I mean, the fact also that they ask for help about this shows... Hey, can you help me? Yeah, I can't figure out how to get this into my personal laptop. Yeah. I just... It boggles the mind. It really does. Most of this data was in M365 government. Ah! It's Microsoft. Ah! Was they got the admin accounts. Yeah, they got God accounts. Yeah, they called them God accounts.

[01:37:08] So they got admin access, which means they literally had drive-level access to everything. They may or not enable how to utilize the data or anything, but you've got drive-level access, so copy everything. Yeah. Wired got the identification. I won't say the person's name on the show, but he is now the chief technology officer at Leidos.

[01:37:39] He's denying everything, of course. Of course. Oh, yes. I feel like the problem is, you know, every week I get another letter from another company saying that my social security number and every other thing I've given them has been exposed. It's like, whose social security number is not in the wrong hands these days? It's like, we need to have a complete sort of reset on how we handle or what data actually becomes,

[01:38:08] is essential to recognize and identify us. I saw another article this week about something, an absurd number of tax returns have been filed using fraudulent data. So people, and it's quite common I hear to like log in to do your taxes if you use an online service and it'll be like, oh, you've already filed. Oh no. Because that's not good. Yeah. Yeah. So like we've, we've lost control. Well then that was what Doge was supposed to fix, right? Doge was supposed to fix fraud.

[01:38:38] The, the, the sad truth of it is, you know, Elon said it was going to save the government two, two trillion dollars. It saved very little money. Mm-hmm. Uh, in fact that's- It actually cost more money than it saved, yeah. And that's actually the, the cause for this lawsuit by the, um, Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Historical Association.

[01:39:01] They're suing the National Endowment for the Humanities because their grants were cut by Doge. Hundreds of millions of dollars of grants were cut by Doge. And in this lawsuit, uh, the Doge kids were brought in, uh, to testify. Now, uh, the MLA posted that on YouTube and the judge immediately said, uh, yeah, no, that's a deposition. You, that's confidential. You can't post it.

[01:39:29] Uh, but of course, once it's on YouTube. Too late, man. It's no, I mean, 404 did a fantastic job on this. Yeah. And, uh, I feel for, I, Joe Cox I'm known for a while and, but they actually had somebody sit through six hours of this testimony and go through with it. And the guy, some of these guys, there's a, Germans have a word for everything. Okay. And there's a German word and forgive me for this, but it's back fail. Which is a face made for punching.

[01:39:59] I looked at that and it was just like, this guy was like, no, we just fed it into chat. Beatty chat GPT. And it told us whether it was DEI or not. So we just deleted it. And it's like, that's people's lives. Here he is trying to explain what DEI is. There was the EO explicitly laid out the details. I don't remember it off the top of my head. I'm asking for your understanding of it. Yeah. My understanding was exactly what was written in the EO. Yeah. He says, I don't know what DEI is, but I know it when I see it. Right.

[01:40:28] They were basically, they were, if, if, if a, a grant was, uh, uh, application mentioned a black person, a tribal person, a native American, uh, uh, LBGTQ, it was in there. They would just cancel the grant period. That was it. Yeah. It was basically a word search. Um, No, it means he was just searching for the string. Uh, exactly. I don't know what it means. I just know what I'm told.

[01:40:57] Even the word diverse was in that. Um, so like even when the verse, even stuff like, we need a diversity, equity, inclusion, even like we need a diverse set of evidence, stuff like that even got. So it wasn't even connected to anything racial or anything like that. I was, I was talking about this with my next door neighbor. Um, cause there's a younger guy than Justin Fox who was also deposed and she's a teacher. And she was just like, I know those kids at school.

[01:41:26] They think they know it all and they know bugger all. And they are kids. Yeah. Mm. And I'm not surprised they stole the data because why wouldn't you, you know, it's like, you've got access to that database. It almost don't even blame them. I blame the people who put them in there. Yeah. Yeah. That's who you blame. What's the German word? Uh, you've got it up on the screen now is I can't pronounce it because it's German and I can speak a little French, but not German, but back.

[01:41:54] So it's basically, it's compound word meaning to punch someone and their face. So it's a face made for punching. Fife. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to say. Yeah. I've, I've tried to learn German for a couple of years and I just can't do it. Back five means punch or slap on the cheek or face. And a guess I means face. So yeah. Yeah. There's a reason there are no great German love poets. Put it that way. It isn't exactly a romantic.

[01:42:25] Uh, let's see what else we're talking about, uh, things, uh, government is doing that we don't like. How about this? Uh, Texas has banned lab grown salmon. Uh, because, um, Texans have quote, a God given right to know what's on their plate.

[01:42:51] And for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. Hmm. So, uh, it's, it's, it's poisoned by pollutants. It's got heavy, heavy metals in there, but no lab grown stuff is just, you know. Well, that's a reason to ban it. Okay. But I think you could, oh no, yeah, the lab grown stuff doesn't have that. No, exactly. If you, if you, if you catch a salmon in the river, God knows what's gone into it. Yeah.

[01:43:19] So this is a company, a California company called wild type. They sell lab grown salmon. It's never salmon that never swam or anything. It's just, they take cells and they grow them. Right? Yeah. Uh, and they're suing Texas because Texas bans cell cultivated meat. The company's founder says lab grown salmon eliminates the mercury microplastics and antibiotic contamination found, typically found in seafood. Does it have you, has anybody tasted lab grown meat?

[01:43:49] Uh, yeah, I've done, I've done lab grown meat. It's honestly, it tastes pretty much the same, you know, I mean, it's, it even bleeds because they put beetroot, beetroot juice in there. But I mean, stop doing that. That's disgusting. I mean, we, we probably need to start growing more things like this because, you know, we, we, our resources, I mean, salmon, they're still fairly, I mean, after one, really, they were, they were close to extinction a few decades ago, but they brought them back.

[01:44:18] But then things like beef, you know, that the resources that they use to. Oh, forget data centers. Yeah. So if we, we do more of this, not less.

[01:44:31] And the quote at the end of this article that, and I, from my least favorite governor of all time, um, is, um, that we're, we're fighting back against the global elites plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals. I'm like, what the, what, what, what are you doing? Authoritarian goals. By the way, people might think since we were talking about Texas, you're talking about Governor Abbott. It's actually Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis. Yeah.

[01:45:01] I'm, I'm, I live very close to Florida. My parents lived in Florida. Um, and yeah. There's a ban in Florida and Texas. Yeah. Ron DeSantis is one of the, yeah. Anyway, I won't get too political. Well, this is insane. This makes no sense to say this is the global elites plan. What, why would, why would the global elite want to force people to eat lab grown meat? What is the point here? Is it always to get rid of farming? Is that the point? No, we've got a global. The same people who brought your COVID vaccines. The global elite.

[01:45:30] We have a global food crisis. Yeah. And if we can create another way to, to develop nutritious, healthy food. Without killing an animal. Without killing an animal. Without ingesting toxins and plastics ourselves. All the cost. Yeah. And they're not talking about saying like, we can't, you can't eat real salmon, but you know, having alternatives is. That's the thing. Why ban it? Right. Well, no, I mean, I mean, yeah, I mean, it says it's Leo, you're up in Petaluma, which is big chicken farming country.

[01:45:59] And if you go down wind of a chicken farm, my God. And yeah, same thing with the beef feed loot feed lots. I would welcome like lab grown meat. We call it here. Sonoma aroma. Really? Oh my God. That's great. Uh, here's another one that makes me mad. So apparently, uh, there is now, uh, and I bet you would know about this, Jennifer. Uh, you can get plug in solar panels.

[01:46:28] They're, they're very, you don't have to install them on your roof. You could put them on your, on your deck, on your, uh, a garage and they plug in and then they power your house. They're popular in Germany. More than 1.2 million of the systems are registered with the German government. They are not legal in the U S because when Utah, Oh, Utah. Good for you, Utah. Utah has the first law supporting plug in solar, but finally, Utah's ahead of the game,

[01:46:56] but, but of course, utilities don't want you generating your own electricity. And so, uh, it's illegal. State lawmakers are now in 30 States talking about making plug in solar legal. Have you played with this at all, Jennifer? You know, I think about it. Yeah. Well, it's actually very common in Europe. Um, in fact, my last time I visited England, I was at my aunt's house and they had literally

[01:47:22] found a solar panel in a dump and resurrected it and plugged it into their house and were powering some lights on their porch because these, these can't necessarily power your entire home. No. These are small arrays that you could just power like your refrigerator. If the power's gone down, um, or you could power a small apartment maybe.

[01:47:45] Um, so the roof balcony solar is kind of what was the original kind of, um, trend in, in Europe is that, you know, if you have a small apartment and you just want to power a few things, you can just hang solar off your balcony. And it's a way of bringing solar to people that live in apartments as well, because you can't, you know, right for, for so long, solar is really limited to someone. If you own your own home and you've got to spare 20 grand to install them. And they're really, it's a complicated process.

[01:48:14] Um, my, uh, my colleague, uh, Thomas Ricker at the verge who's in, um, Denmark, no, the Netherlands, Amsterdam, he lives in Amsterdam and he tests a lot of this type of plug in solar or portable solar. And, and it's, it's a great, it's a great thing to be able to have a backup source that is not the grid without having to invest a huge amount of money. I mean, I've got solar panels. I think Leo, you have solar panels, don't you? Um, yeah. Yeah.

[01:48:42] And they, you know, it's a, it's great if you can have it and we're seeing it. They're hugely expensive. I think we spent tens of thousands of dollars on them. And there, and the utilities are pushing against this for safety reasons, they say, but obviously a significant issue for them is they don't want people generating their own power. Although there are some utilities who we've seen sort of the flip side, because we are seeing a real surgence of, um, VPNs, like virtual power networks.

[01:49:10] So where utilities can actually tap into people who have that, who are generating their own energy and storing it in batteries, um, in order to help stabilize the grid. So I think we're kind of at a, we're at a tipping point with the grid in America. Um, and I can imagine whilst we've seen resistance to this type of technology today, I would have thought, you know, within the next five to 10 years, as more and more electric utility

[01:49:37] companies start to realize the value and benefit of being able to kind of spread the generation of energy and not just have to rely on large power plants. Not that small little solar panels like this are going to help, but just solar panels in general in people's homes, batteries in people's homes. I'm actually seeing, we've seen an uptick of people installing batteries without solar panels just so that they have, um, a resource. Like instead of a generator, you've got a shift and the time of use rates.

[01:50:07] So I think, I think we're going to start, this is going to start to be a big trend. I think they're fighting it. If there's an upside to the gas crisis, the oil crisis, that might be it. If energy price becomes, uh, for fossil fuels gets so high. Yeah. Renewals get much more. You know, you can get your solar panels shipped in. They don't have to go through the straits of Ormuz. But it's, it's, I mean. Utility companies are worried because it's always hot.

[01:50:34] So, and, and anyway, they raised a lot of safety concerns. Backfeeding is an issue, but backfeeding is also testable. Well, it's, and they point out there've been millions of systems installed in Germany and there have been no safety instance. Yeah. It's reported at all. Yeah. And the UL is doing, they're doing a certification for these systems. Right. And I think that's sort of going through tweaks, but eventually it should be a, I mean, I think there's a lot of fear mongering and maybe scare mongering right now, but ultimately there's

[01:51:03] this solution could be applied to, and it's great to be able to, I mean, instead of having a AC unit sticking out your window, you know, you can hang some solar panels and power your fan in the house. Yeah. Part of the problem is that in the, in California anyway, these are private, our power companies are private industries and they really, their business really is building power plants and

[01:51:27] then selling PG&E are just the, the scum of the, sorry, I shouldn't be so quite, but. They've raised rates so many times in the last two years. Well, we've just got another fee this month, but I mean, they're really worried about this because as Jennifer pointed out, if you've got local power things, a local power system sorted out, that kind of takes their entire modus operandi away. I've just started cert training with the fire department here and they're saying get

[01:51:55] solar because you know, when the electricity goes out, you're on your own and you need an independent power supply. And you know, if the electricity goes out across the state after a major earthquake, there's going to be no gas pumps working. So if you're on an electric car, get yourself. Does California require solar panels on residential now? Like you. On new residential. Yeah. Oh good. You have to get a permit to not put solar panels. Oh, that's great. I love hearing that. With new builds then.

[01:52:25] Sorry. And if you want to buy, if you're, if you, if you're interested in this, I mean, you could technically do this where even if you're not in a state that allows it because it doesn't require any permitting, you just have to make sure that no one can buy one, but you can buy them. So ecoflow actually sells a DIY balcony solar system that you can go and buy right now. I really like this. I might, I have a balcony. It's called stream series. We had a, I have to correct it because we did, we had, I think 60 solar panels on our

[01:52:54] old house and two Tesla batteries, but we moved and we don't have any now. We don't have any batteries now. And I feel naked to be honest with you. I actually just got a whole system installed that I'm going to test. So I'm going to start covering the ecoflow smart panel and ecoflow batteries. I'm testing. We're putting that in here too. You are. Okay. Yeah. Well, the whole point with that, with this smart panel is you get to pick what breakers essentially go on battery. So there's no back feeding risk.

[01:53:24] Cause when the battery is feeding it, that breaker's not on the main panel anymore. Yeah. So the panel feeds the battery and then the battery feeds the breaker. So that eliminates the backflow. Yeah. But they switch between them. Okay. So being like when, when power goes out here, not that unusual. I'm lacingly living in the wilderness. Uh, there's some things you just don't want to power, right? You don't want a power base board heat. Use the fireplace. Like that's not necessary. Yeah. Yeah. Those breakers are literally marked as your refrigerators. You definitely want that one going, right? Yeah.

[01:53:53] Keep some lights going like that kind of stuff. That's where all the bear meat is. Yeah. Let the stove, let the stove go. You're going to cook on the, on the, on the cast iron. Right. Yeah. And this is a review from last year that Thomas Ricker did, but it's on the verge ecoflow. Um, so, so you can get them now. So that's, you can buy the, the balcony ones. Yeah. You just only technically legally allowed to use them in Utah, but, um, but yeah, cause the permitting and all of that with solar is one of the biggest, you know, pains along with the price. Not a small problem. No.

[01:54:23] And that was, we had to, we bought it from solar city, which is now a Tesla company. And you actually, we had a power purchase agreement. It was kind of a crazy thing. It's amortized over 20 years and the whole thing. And when we moved, it was a big pain. We had to kind of the new owners had to take over the agreement. It was just kind of a mess. It's really. Yeah. Your sale. The idea here of just being able to plug it into an outlet rather than having a regular

[01:54:50] outlet, literally just into an outlet instead of hooking it all up into your electrical system. So you don't need an inverter or anything, or that's what the, that's in the, it's in the panel. And then you could plug it into one of EcoFlow's backup battery power things too. So that you could then have, you know, you could power anything from that. They have their big portable batteries with lots of outlets and plugs in. And so if you plug the solar into that, you can charge the battery. And then from the battery, you could charge anything in your house.

[01:55:19] So it'd be great for, you know, for areas where you have frequent power outages. I mean, I live in the South where we have hurricanes, which was one of the reasons we wanted to try testing this system because I'm now technically my own little micro grid. So if when I generate enough power, I can run and I get a little alert on the EcoFlow app. It says, Oh, you're off grid. And it's like, woohoo. I love that feeling. Isn't that great? Yeah. When we had the Tesla power walls, it was great.

[01:55:48] Every once in a while, we'd be, or we'd be feeding power back into the grid, which is also cool. They don't let you do that anymore. Well, I mean, you can, but they don't give you any money for it. They'll pay you for it. No. So that's why batteries are much more attractive now. Cause the more, when you generate more energy, just save it for yourself and use it later. The thinking about that in ourselves just to, you know, cause the power goes out occasionally, but if there's a bad situation, then it's nice to have that power in house. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:56:17] You know, Australia has got the highest percentage, especially Southeastern Australia of residential solar. And there's a lot of sun. A lot of sun. Yeah. There's an endless supply. So now you have to have the ability for the power company to disable your solar because they're overwhelming the grid. You have too much. Too much. Oh, good grief. Yeah. If only. I mean, I'm surprised that Arizona hasn't gone big on this cause they have the sunshine. Yeah.

[01:56:45] You know, Arizona and New Mexico, they could be huge solar states, but instead the building data centers in a water poor area, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah. Just imagine if our government was into renewables, right? Just imagine. It's ironic because while the current administration doesn't like any of this cause they got a lot of donations. It's all happening in spite of the deficit. It's happening anyway, because the economics of it are so good.

[01:57:12] Remember that Trump stopped that big wind installation off the coast of Massachusetts. It's now done. The judge said, you can't stop it. It's now done. It's true. And, and Bill Gates just got permission to build his Terra power nuclear. This is, these are the new, you're an expert on this, Richard. These are these new sodium. I talk on this. Nuclear. Sodium is not new. Okay. Um, so normally we make nuclear power with using water as both the working fluid and the moderator.

[01:57:42] Light water reactors are the majority of reactors in this world. And there's reason for that. That moderation means we slow the neutrons down. Use what they call a thermal neutron instead of a fast neutron because the neutrons interact with the water and it changes. The nice thing when you're in the thermal neutron spectrum is you don't need as many to interact with the radioactive material. So it's a little easier to manage, although it has certain side effects. And, and you're heating the water for steam to generate electricity as well. That's right.

[01:58:10] That's how the, yeah, becomes the, that's the part of, it's the working fluid. It's what moves the heat to the heat exchangers to make the energy. Uh, when you play with, when you're working with sodium, sodium is transparent to neutrons. So you are working in the fast spectrum. Hmm. Now there's an upside and downside to this. The upside of the fast spectrum is a high velocity, high energy neutrons, uh, are more likely to break uranium up rather than to make it into higher actinites.

[01:58:38] You know, you, the primary source of plutonium for nuclear bombs is light water reactors. Light water reactors because the neutrons move slower. Sometimes the neutron sticks to the uranium and then decays in an alpha particle to become a, uh, uh, does beta decay to become neptunium. And then when it does it again, it becomes plutonium. Huh? Uh, when you're in the fast spectrum, you're far less likely to do that. It tends to break the atoms into pieces. You're doing transmutation. You're making cesium and iodine and a bunch of other things.

[01:59:08] Um, so that's cool. And plus molten sodium can handle a lot more heat in order to get enough, enough energy out of water. We have to pressurize the reactor, right? You wanted the water to get up to about 300 degrees, which doesn't want to do. Uh, so you have to keep it in the pressure vessel. When you do this with sodium, you don't have to pressurize. So you happily runs along about 600 degrees. Uh, so you can handle a lot more energy. What's the downside you ask? Well, sodium reacts with absolutely everything, mostly water, which turns to be everywhere.

[01:59:38] So you have to purge the vessel in all pipes of any moisture of any kind. Pretty much all hydrogen has to be purged out of it. I seem to remember in high school chemistry that we had a little piece of sodium we took out and exposed to the air and it burst into flame. Burst into flame. You throw it in the water, it'll explode. Yeah. Okay. And you're gonna fill up your reactor with that. And we're using this to cool the plant? Well, you're using that as the working fluid. It's not a water. Oh, okay. We're using this to heat it up. It gets hot. You pump that away.

[02:00:08] How do they scram this though? If it doesn't slow the. Uh, you, you, you, you scram it pretty much the same way with absorb, with absorbing rods and boron rods. Okay. So that part's similar. Uh, it does run at a higher temperature. The, the downside is your neutron concentrations are really, really high. So it is tricky to manage. Yeah. Slowing them down, shutting them out and speeding them up. All of that is fairly tough, but that's part of the taro power design.

[02:00:35] So they're actually using lithium beryllium salts as the heat transfer fluid. So this is, uh, a way instead of. It's not sodium. It's not sodium. Well, they still got its problems. Beryllium is wildly poisonous. Oh, but. Well, I'm not gonna eat it. That's okay. No, but the, but the upside to the, using the salt approach for the, the heat transfer is they can store it. And so rather than having to constantly vary the, the performance of the reactor, how

[02:01:03] much you're charging based on power needs, you run it at full bore all the time. And when you don't need as much power, you just store that as excess heat in the beryllium salts. And that's very clever. Like they're talking about, it's a 300 megawatt reactor, but they can do like four hours at 500 megawatts. Cause they have all this excess heat stored. Um, the real challenge with molts with, with working with sodium reactors is when you do need to shut them down, which you do occasionally, you have to get all the sodium out of the reactor vessel or reacts.

[02:01:32] Maybe it explodes like it's dangerous and fires. So there's only really one sodium reactor working in the world right now. And it's in Russia. Cause they're not that worried about the fires. They're okay with that. We had Chernobyl. It was okay. We could do it. It's not a big deal. Russian engineering. Yeah. And to be clear, if you read the article, I mean, they've gotten permission. So they, they built the energy generation island first. So this was the beryllium salts and the generators and all that stuff.

[02:02:01] They didn't have permission to build the reactor at all. They just got permission to build the reactor now, but they do not have permission to get any fuel. They can't turn it on yet. No. Well, they're not even allowed to buy the fuel and they need halo fuel, which is like the source of the fuel is going to be a problem. They're going to need literally to specially make that fuel and anything involving radioactives is hugely difficult. So they, I mean, it's backed by gates so they can afford to wait. Like they're not exactly on a budget per se.

[02:02:31] Um, the upside if they can make this thing work is it is a fuel burner. They'll want to buy used light water reactor fuel. Oh, yeah. Consume it in this reactor. Neat. So that, that is a feature if they can make this thing work. Uh, and obviously we build more of them, uh, cause it does tend to consume actinides more so than light water reactors do. And is, are these the modular smaller nuclear power plants I keep hearing?

[02:02:59] So far they've talked about in the 300 megawatt class, which is a sort of large modular reactor. Uh, SMRs were kind of a way to be allowed to talk about nuclear reactors when you're not allowed to talk about nuclear reactors. And so, you know, even in the case in Canada where we were headed down the path of using the GE attache SMR at the Darlington B site, they've now backed away from that. Cause once you get all the permitting done and you're ready to build a reactor, it's like, you might as well build a big one. A, you know how to run them already. B, they make a lot more power and they're kind of simpler.

[02:03:27] You know, the current legal rules for nuclear reactors require a separate control room for each reactor. Well, that's fine if you only have two reactors, but what if you have 16? That's a lot of control rooms. I mean, I interviewed, there's a startup called Deep Fission. I interviewed them about, cause their idea is to drill a mile down into the planet below the aquifer, fill, you know, put a small pressure, a small nuclear reactor down there, use gravity to pressurize it.

[02:03:57] And yeah, the control room problem is a massive one. It's a big one. Because yeah. And New Scale, who's another SMR company out of Idaho, they actually got the permits to be able to do a combined, uh, uh, uh, uh, they, they convinced the, the, the, the uh, energy agency to actually allow them to combine, uh, control rooms, but then they lost their, they, they lost their buyer. So now they're struggling to, they've now got to deal with Romania.

[02:04:24] Like they're trying to make this go forward, but the regulatory body was built around large reactors and it's extremely hard for small reactors to make sense in this current regulatory environment. Let's take a little break. When we come back, uh, Travis Kalanick is back. Oh boy. Turns up like herpes. Yes. And he's been very busy. So, you know, stay tuned. Uh, we are talking about all kinds of stuff this week on twit. Thanks to Richard Campbell.

[02:04:52] Great to have you from run his radio and windows weekly. Uh, Jennifer Patterson, too, we have the verge senior reviewer there and Mr. Ian Thompson. His letter from America appears in techfinitive at techfinitive.com. Our show today brought to you by spaceship. I'm not, I'm not talking about UFOs. I'm talking about spaceship, which is my favorite domain registrar, but more than that, if you've

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[02:06:44] You can build and test before committing because almost every spaceship product comes with a 30 day trial. I love that. I think that's always the way it should be. And they really do too. But if you prefer to use your own tools, no problem. Just point your domain to what you need by updating your DNS records and name servers. In fact, when I set up a secretly British for Paris, she hasn't set up the site yet. So I just pointed it to her existing site was super easy and she got email with it and everything.

[02:07:13] So you have the freedom to build your stack exactly how you want. When you're ready, you can set up whatever you need. Basically, it's the best of every world. Visit spaceship.com slash twit to learn more. That's spaceship.com slash twit. And by the way, a gorgeous site too, or we found the best registrar at spaceship. And they have a nice little AI named ALF that will help you do all the hard stuff. Spaceship.com slash twit.

[02:07:41] It was all over X. Travis Kalanick is back, man. And it turns out he never left. Travis Kalanick, you know the name. He's the guy who created Uber and then was forced out by the board for a toxic workplace. And I don't know. It was like for good reason. Yes. Yeah. Uh, I think he's quite a character and certainly people, uh, still have a lot of, uh, uh, I think, uh, affection for him.

[02:08:11] What he did immediately after was he started ghost kitchen company. That was weird called cloud kitchens. And then he had a real estate called city storage systems. Uh, but he's renamed it all to atoms and published a website with a manifesto. Um, the thesis it's atoms.co.

[02:08:39] And if you go to atoms.co slash vision, you can see the manifesto. He starts by saying, I left Uber in 2017 heartbroken. Um, it was only days after the death of my mother and near death of my father in a boating accident when investors decided to come out from the shadows and exploit this vulnerable moment to wrestle control of my company away from me. I bled, but I did not perish.

[02:09:07] I got back up and fought my way back into the arena. And if a lot of people said he's been secretly creating this empire, he says, and actually I thought this was the most interesting part of this. I don't really know if atoms.co is going anywhere or if his vision has any sense to it, but he said, you have to understand my idea has always been to digitize the physical world. He says that was my life's work.

[02:09:34] So Uber was to add software in effect to ride sharing, right? Um, he, then he did real estate. Then he said our first computer was a food computer, which digitized manufacturing, real estate and logistics for food. He says the whole thing, the whole world is food. Everything comes from growing it, mining it and transporting it.

[02:10:03] And so he wants to do all three of those with AI and robots. That's the real business at atoms. We make gainfully employed robots, specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at large. Are you interested in investing? What do you, what do you think Ian? Are you ready to put some money on the table?

[02:10:29] I do love the phrase gainfully employed robots, which means not gainfully employed humans. You know, I mean, it's that's what he says. It's going to be a golden age where you won't have to work. Uh, yeah, but then you also don't get paid. The next age will be upon us when the means of growing, mining, manufacturing and moving physical things becomes fully divorced from human labor, which does raise the question.

[02:10:57] Well, who's going to buy these things you're growing, mining, manufacturing and moving if nobody has a job? Oh, please. Those are piffling details, Leo. Honestly, it's just. He says the cost of unit cost per unit of intelligence is going down in price by 90% per year. That's probably true with AI. I don't know. Total capabilities and general intelligence have increased nearly a thousand fold over the last three years. Possibly true.

[02:11:24] Hardware, software and manufacturing productivity will continue to compound each other to ever increasing speeds of progress. We're only a millionth of the way there. And don't worry. But the inevitable destination is the singularity. Oh, superhuman intelligence and efficiency until then. I don't know what's going to happen after that, but until then abundance will be creating more jobs, not less. So there. Yeah, right.

[02:11:52] I get the feeling with so many of these tech bros that they've read in banks and not really understood the message behind it. But it is exactly what Ian Banks universe was right where there was kind of everything was handled. Everything was. Well, yes, but he kind of skips over the 7000 years before that where there were sort of mass problems. And if you read his notes on the on the development of the culture, you know, it's just this was a necessity thing out there eventually. Yeah.

[02:12:23] Yeah. But I mean, it's many generations have to die. But, you know, that'll be fine. Well, just as the Palantir CEO said, you know, it's just like, yeah, you're all going to lose your jobs. But trust me, it'll be better. Really. It'll be great. That is the last. That is test. That is what they're that's what they think, though. Probably. They're saving the trillions about the children's of the future. The future we care about, not the present. Yeah. Kalanick says his last three words are I never left. Mm hmm.

[02:12:52] It sure looks like it's a pitch to investors. Remember, Uber never made money. I don't know if he he raised more money than anybody till AI came along. Right. Right. Yeah. My favorite quote on all that is when you raise $60 billion, there's no way to make good choices. You have too much money to make. You have too much money. Yeah. You can't possibly make good choices.

[02:13:16] Somebody pointed out, I think it was Robert Scoble, that what happened at Uber was the whole plot was really to have self-driving vehicles. It never made economic sense if humans were involved. Mm hmm. So but when when he was forced out, the company got rid of the autonomous vehicle portion of the business. And so it never was going to make money. The interesting thing is the guy. I'm sorry.

[02:13:44] Uber remains the only self-driving vehicle company that's actually killed somebody. You know, they they they actually went in there. You know, somebody got run over. They they died. And, you know, yeah, you're right. The Uber economic business model doesn't make sense without self-driving cars. And it's interesting to see who they've teamed up with. But I personally wouldn't trust Kalanick further than I could throw him. And I have poor upper body strength. So yeah. Yeah. I think Waymo has a fatality as well.

[02:14:13] Oh, really? So let's make it that's fair. Let's spread it out. I do think the theory here behind robotics in being specialized robots rather than single rather than an all purpose robot like a humanoid makes an awful lot of sense. Not sure whether specifically his, you know, this business is going to make sense.

[02:14:35] But I've spent a lot of time with robots and individual like single purpose robots and even humanoid robots.

[02:14:44] And there is there's a place for robotics that in our lives and in our workforces and in our homes and single purpose individual specialized robots that can do one or two things really well, I think, is the is really the future of robotics in our in our society rather than the sort of flashy Jetson Iron Man dream of. Of a robot that can do everything. That's Elon's dream.

[02:15:13] I just don't see that actually. And I've said this before on the show, I know. And I know there's people in the in the discord that vehemently disagree with me and think we're like a day away from humanoid robots. But I think it's a lot further away than we think. And you have more experience with robotics and household things than anyone. Yeah. A robot fell on you for crying. Yes. Almost killed you. Almost got me. So and then that's the biggest thing.

[02:15:40] I think that's the biggest fear and concern and reason why we won't have humanoid robots is they are dangerous. And whereas single purpose or one or dual purpose specialized robots make a lot more sense. Well, he's on to something. Well, interestingly, Kalanick says he's an investor in Pronto, which is a self-driving truck startup, but it focuses on mining sites where there are no people. Right. And in fact, Pronto is run by the guy Kalanick recruited from Google, Anthony Lewandowski.

[02:16:10] He got in trouble with Google for taking information was claimed taking information from Google and bringing it over to Uber. And apparently he's working with Levandowski again. Yeah, that was a really interesting case. It was just like, oh, I'm leaving Google. I'm starting. I think it was auto self-driving truck software.

[02:16:33] And oh, we've just got bought out by by Uber for a massive amount of money for a product which doesn't have any, you know, anything in it. I mean, honestly, Google sued Uber for stealing that information. Levandowski was actually convicted of stealing trade secrets. I forgot this part. He didn't go to jail because he got pardoned. Yeah, the president. So, yeah. Also read the court documents. Some of the testimony there, the discovery on that.

[02:17:00] This is a really interesting person, possibly not in a good way. It is. It is tempting to think that this is basically another. I don't want to say con job, but similar to, you know, sorry, did you say startup? Yes. Start up with very big ambitions, right? Very global kind of futuristic ambitions.

[02:17:27] But like mining is one of those jobs where like maybe humans shouldn't be doing that anyway. Like shouldn't be mining. Right. And I kind of, I thought that was kind of an interesting insight that, you know, everything's either grown or mined and then manufactured. And that the, you know, there are really four things that you need to solve. John Cusack said all that. I don't say anything. Mining materials. That's the John Cusack monologue. And then transporting them. To Cusack said anywhere. Say anything. The mining, sorry.

[02:17:56] The mining thing is very interesting because in Australia, they've already automated a lot of the lorries that are working in mining compounds because it's a really simple use case. There are very limited roads that these trucks can go through because the mine is built down and they build the road in there so you can map it out really easily. So, yeah, mining will probably pay, but he's late to the party. But I don't know.

[02:18:23] When I read that piece and it was just like, give me more money now. It does feel like a kind of a magical pitch deck, you know, but it's okay. I don't have enough money to invest. So I'm safe. A Tennessee grandmother. This is a horrific case of misidentification. A Tennessee grandmother was jailed. A facial recognition error linked her to fraud.

[02:18:52] She's from Tennessee, but Fargo, North Dakota police. It's not that close to Tennessee if my, if my geography is correct. Identified her using face recognition. They said, oh yeah, she walked into a bank in Fargo, North Dakota. And committed fraud. They came to Tennessee.

[02:19:20] They arrested her, put her in jail for six months in Fargo. She's a mother of three grandmother of five. She said, I've never been to North Dakota. She'd never been on an airplane until she was flown to North Dakota for charges. U.S. Marshals erased her. The only evidence apparently was this face recognition. She remained, started in a Tennessee jail, four months without bail while awaiting extradition,

[02:19:49] then charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personally identified information and four counts of theft. According to Fargo police records obtained by WDAY news, detectives investigating this case in May and April of last year reviewed surveillance video, used face recognition. The face recognition said, oh yeah, it's this woman in Tennessee. The detective told the court, we got to get her.

[02:20:20] By the time she got an attorney and went to trial, they proved that she was still in Tennessee at the time, 1,200 miles away at the time of this bank fraud. Which a simple check of her bank records and location records easily could have revealed. Trivial. Yeah. Why would it take so long to figure out that she, I mean, they should have made these steps before arresting her. Oh, really? Yeah. It's called an investigation. Yeah. And don't just rely on this technology.

[02:20:50] Well, the holder on, I mean, she, she was held on extradition. Right? Like she hadn't been charged. Yeah. She hadn't gone to court. She hadn't done anything. Four months. And she lost her for a month. And then, I mean, it gets worse. Her car. Go ahead. Tell us the rest of the story. No, no, this is it. She lost it all. But it gets worse because when they found out their error, they released her from jail on Christmas Eve with no money, no way of getting in contact with people.

[02:21:15] And it was only down to the kindness of a local, a local person that she actually got somewhere to spend Christmas that was warmer. I mean, Fargo, I've never been, but I know it's damn cold on Christmas Eve. They, they stick her out of the jail in Fargo in the winter. Bye bye. I guess we, I guess we got the wrong person. See you later. They don't take her back to Tennessee. I assume she is going to get a lot of money in the future. She's going to get a lawn would hope. Yes. While she was jailed and unable to pay bills, she lost her home, her cat, her dog. No amount of money replaces that.

[02:21:45] Ha. She says no one from Fargo has, police department has apologized. Ah. So this is where AI really can go wrong. Yes. This is computers full stop. Remember when it's like, oh, the computer said it, so it must be true. Right. Right. Yeah. Somehow the science fiction layer we've added to computing is brought back of this level of stupidity. Hmm. Yeah. And really, as always, it's not the AI, it's the people using it that are the problem.

[02:22:13] Well, yeah, but I mean, what kind of policeman actually goes out and says, well, the AI said it is fine. You know, we're not going to do any kind of investigation in jail for four months while we figure out how to extradite her. Yeah. And there's no comeback to them because, you know, Fargo taxpayers will pay the eventual lawsuit, which I hope she wins and gets an enormous amount of money out of. Mm hmm. Here's the good news. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. Oh, geez. He says that. You and me both, Richard.

[02:22:43] Yeah. I haven't heard good news from that guy ever. This is an interview on CNBC. He said, AI technology disrupts humanities trained largely Democratic voters and makes their economic power less and increases the economic power of vocationally trained working class, often male working class voters. So AI is going to be bad if you're educated female and a Democrat, but it's going to be good.

[02:23:13] I don't even understand the logic. That's just extraordinarily convulking. You know, I don't even. Yeah, I don't even understand the logic. Uh, I guess get the logic. The fact that he said it out loud was really, really, I mean, I know it's a Peter's heel company, so it's obviously going to be a bit weird. But the fact that he actually said, this is what we're working towards is just like,

[02:23:42] are you aware of public relations? You know? Cuckoo. Well, sort of constructive way of saying it democratizes knowledge. Like you could have gone down that path. We argued that was what the internet was going to do in the first place. Yeah. And of course, Palantir's all over the government. The register had this very important story about how the Department of Agriculture used Palantir's lethal AI weaponry to find seat assignments for employees at the department. Nice.

[02:24:11] Yeah, no, they're into the UK as well. They've just signed major contracts with Britain's National Health Care, uh, Health Service. And, um, in part organized by the disgraced Peter Mandelson. But I mean, they are getting their claws into government. The USDA's chief data and artificial intelligence officer, Christopher Alvarez, says other software companies could probably sort out seating plans, but only Palantir could do the job right.

[02:24:38] Probably assigns democratic women offices way far away, I would guess. But I would also argue like, let's be clear. We're not fans of this guy, but he's not a stupid man. No. He's very smart. Who was he actually talking to when he said those absurd things? Ah. Yeah. Right. I think he's somebody who doesn't want democratic women in power. I think it's just like, I'm looking forward to the phone calls I get for, you know, what I can do from that.

[02:25:08] He knows, he knows who signs those checks. Yeah. MIT technology review, how Pokemon go is giving delivery robots an inch perfect view of the world. We kind of knew this, right? When Niantic, which was a Google company at the time, created Pokemon go, the wonderful game. My wife still plays avidly since July of 2016. So there was a game before Pokemon go that built this data set ingress. Yes. Yeah. And I was the ingress player back in the day. Yeah.

[02:25:36] Cause it was, you had to be a lot smarter. You couldn't be a democratic woman and play ingress. So, uh, no, ingress was ingress was hard, but it had the same idea, which is that you walk around in the real world and use actual geographic. Way points. The genius of Niantic is they got us to build the data set because I wanted more nodes to play ingress. I would find everything that could possibly be tagged as a landmark. Exactly. To get more nodes in my neighborhood. Thanks to ingress and Pokemon go.

[02:26:06] They have 30 billion, 30 billion way points all over the world. Unbelievable. Images of urban landmarks outsourced to Pokemon go players. And they are selling that information to delivery robots. Genius. Cause there was no money in ingress. There's no money in Pokemon go. I mean, they started to try and charge for things and people just stopped playing, including me. So the company's latest product is a model.

[02:26:36] They're out of the Pokemon business. Remember they sold that to the, uh, uh, Saudi Arabian, uh, sovereign wealth fund. Their new companies, Niantic spatial. They say their latest products, a model that can pinpoint your location on a map within a few centimeters based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in the area. It knows immediately. Oh, I know where you are. I can be used by more than just delivery robots.

[02:27:06] Yeah. There's, I mean, there's been a lot of news recently around how, you know, the surveillance state is, is developing in this country. And yeah, things like this, it's like, it's great when we have technology companies creating something that's useful.

[02:27:22] But now when we have a government that is becoming increasingly authoritarian there and, you know, based on the previous article as well, like all the pieces and parts are so easily brought together to like, just know where everyone is at any point and who they are based on facial recognition that may confuse their mother from Tennessee with someone from North Dakota. It's like, oh great, what could go wrong? These stories go together. They mesh, don't they? They all go together somehow. I don't know. I didn't plan it that way.

[02:27:51] Let me take one last break and then, cause Oscars are going to start any minute now. And then, uh, and we will have some funny final stories to cheer you up. Okay. To cheer you up. Jennifer Patterson-Tooie who's just can't wait to see who won the best picture award. How many of the 10 pictures did you see? Jennifer Patterson- I managed four, I think. It's hard. Jennifer Patterson- Maybe five. Lisa and I used to have this thing of we're going to see every one, but they keep adding pictures. Jennifer Patterson- Now there's 10, it gets a little harder.

[02:28:21] Yeah. I think enough people were doing that, that they just added more because it's good for business. Jennifer Patterson- Good for business. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah. Jennifer Patterson- I have not seen Sinners though, which I know I should have. Jennifer Patterson- Oh, it's a brilliant film. Jennifer Patterson- My whole family's seen it except for me. Jennifer Patterson- Such a wonderful film. Jennifer Patterson- It combines vampires and great music and it's just a really interesting, it's such a different genre busting film. Jennifer Patterson- It's shot so well too. It's a beautiful film. Jennifer Patterson- It's beautiful.

[02:28:49] Jennifer Patterson- And I think the star is going to win a best actor because he plays two roles. Jennifer Patterson- Plays his brothers. Jennifer Patterson- That's the way to get it. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah. Jennifer Patterson- Oscars are nothing if not predictable. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah, that's right. Jennifer Patterson- Anyway, we'll be back in just a moment with Ian, Jennifer, and Richard on a very fun This Week in Tech. Jennifer Patterson- Thank you all for being here. Jennifer Patterson- We appreciate it. Jennifer Patterson- Our show today brought to you by ThreatLocker.

[02:29:18] Jennifer Patterson- We had a great time, didn't we, Richard? Jennifer Patterson- Back in Orlando last week for the ThreatLocker. Jennifer Patterson- Zero Trust World. Jennifer Patterson- So much fun. Jennifer Patterson- They are a very impressive company. Jennifer Patterson- I learned a lot. Jennifer Patterson- They had a bunch of great seminars, hands-on workshops and stuff. Jennifer Patterson- They do Zero Trust. Jennifer Patterson- Their Zero Trust platform now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of Zero Trust solutions. Jennifer Patterson- They've actually made some big announcements in Zero Trust World, protecting

[02:29:47] endpoints, networks, and the cloud. Jennifer Patterson- This is new. Jennifer Patterson- By extending Zero Trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, ThreatLocker Jennifer Patterson- Make sure the devices are validated through a secure broker before connecting to platforms like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Asana, Google Workspace, and GitHub. Jennifer Patterson- Your nightmare is somebody takes a thumb drive and plugs it into your M365 database, right?

[02:30:15] Jennifer Patterson- And not just exfiltrates information, but infiltrates malware, ransomware, or they send you a phishing email or you see an ad on a website that actually is malware. Jennifer Patterson- Even if that happens, even if a user is sticking a USB thumb drive into your database or successfully phished attackers cannot- This is so cool about Zero Trust.

[02:30:40] Jennifer Patterson- They cannot access resources unless they have possession of the user's trusted device Jennifer Patterson- And the trust is built in with ThreatLocker. Jennifer Patterson- ThreatLocker works in every industry, PCs and Macs, and the cloud now. Jennifer Patterson- It provides 24-7 US-based support, the best support ever. Jennifer Patterson- We met a lot of the support people. They're great. Jennifer Patterson- Windows, Mac, Linux. Of course, I always leave Linux out. Jennifer Patterson- No, Linux too. Jennifer Patterson- It enables comprehensive visibility and control. Jennifer Patterson- Ask Rob Thackeray.

[02:31:08] Jennifer Patterson- He's an end-user technical architect at Heathrow Airport. Jennifer Patterson- Now this, if you think about it, Heathrow Airport is the last place you want ransomware, right? Jennifer Patterson- He said, ThreatLocker was the most intuitive solution we tested. Jennifer Patterson- And the responsiveness of the organization, the willingness to engage with us, set up a demo and work with us on weekly audit reviews was very good. Jennifer Patterson- It's great to have an ongoing relationship with the company that's so responsive to our requests.

[02:31:36] Jennifer Patterson- I am not surprised now, having met the ThreatLocker team, so impressed by them. Jennifer Patterson- They're trusted by so many companies, global enterprises like JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver. Jennifer Patterson- ThreatLocker consistently receives high honors in industry recognition as a G2 high performer and best support for enterprise summer 2025. Jennifer Patterson- Peer Spot ranked them number one in application control. Jennifer Patterson- They got GetApp's best functionality and features award in 2025.

[02:32:04] Jennifer Patterson- With ThreatLocker and their ring fencing, you can confidently ensure that users have access to a consistent, safe network connection. Jennifer Patterson- I think sometimes you think zero trust means zero access. Jennifer Patterson- No. Jennifer Patterson- It means that users can do what they need to do without risk. Jennifer Patterson- You can have the offices, remote users, internal servers, critical services, all maintain smooth operations without the need.

[02:32:33] Jennifer Patterson- And this is key to open inbound ports or deploy traditional VPN solutions, which, you know, give you a, you know, a point out there in the real world that the bad guys can hammer on. Jennifer Patterson- Your end users will get the secure, reliable internal system access they need without, and this is important, complex infrastructure changes. Jennifer Patterson- Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily, and cost effectively with ThreatLocker. Jennifer Patterson- I was so impressed. Jennifer Patterson- Visit ThreatLocker.com slash twit. Jennifer Patterson- Get a free 30-day trial.

[02:33:02] Jennifer Patterson- Learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. Jennifer Patterson- It's ThreatLocker.com slash twit. Jennifer Patterson- We thank them so much for their support. Jennifer Patterson- It was really great to be out there, and I hope we can do that again. Jennifer Patterson- Zero Trust World in Orlando. Jennifer Patterson- Are you ready for flying cars, Jennifer? Jennifer Patterson- Well, I was just in Orlando and I'm doing lots of flying. Jennifer Patterson- What? Were you? Jennifer Patterson- I was. Jennifer Patterson- At Disney World.

[02:33:31] Jennifer Patterson- Yeah, epic, epic universal. Jennifer Patterson- Oh, did you do the Harry Potter, you're flying on a broom through Hogwarts ride? Jennifer Patterson- That one- Jennifer Patterson- That's fun. Jennifer Patterson- I haven't done that, though. Jennifer Patterson- Hagrid's one, right? Jennifer Patterson- Yeah. Jennifer Patterson- No, I did the, it was Ministry of Magic. Jennifer Patterson- So it's the new one. Jennifer Patterson- It was, it was very fun. Jennifer Patterson- Oh my goodness, though, that park is a disaster. Jennifer Patterson- Is it? Jennifer Patterson- Oh, because it was crowded. Jennifer Patterson- Just all the rides were down, so- Jennifer Patterson- Oh, everything was broken.

[02:33:59] Jennifer Patterson- It was the night of the clocks going forward. Jennifer Patterson- Oh, and you think everything broke? Jennifer Patterson- And apparently, I read this on Reddit, because while I was standing in line, Jennifer Patterson- I was on Reddit like, what do I do to get around Epic faster? Jennifer Patterson- Reddit is like the solution for everything. Jennifer Patterson- And apparently they were saying that this is a big issue in parks, because everything's running on computers. Jennifer Patterson- And when the clocks go forward, it somehow managed every year, twice a year, it manages to mess them up. Jennifer Patterson- You have a programming pair for that.

[02:34:28] Jennifer Patterson- But there are lots of flying in Epic, and no flying cars though. Jennifer Patterson- But I would love a flying car. Jennifer Patterson- That's like my dream. Jennifer Patterson- Well. Jennifer Patterson- So I'm excited about this. Jennifer Patterson- The federal government has announced a new pilot program designed to get new kinds of ultralight vehicles, and EVTOLs, which is electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles running. Jennifer Patterson- I mean, they're basically drones though, right? Jennifer Patterson- They're big drones, yeah. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah. Jennifer Patterson- Well, but there's a pilot right now still. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah.

[02:34:59] Jennifer Patterson- But soon, maybe not. Jennifer Patterson- When you're in the ultralight class, you need very little training. Jennifer Patterson- Oh. Jennifer Patterson- Disturbingly little training. Jennifer Patterson- Good. Jennifer Patterson- There's an untrained person sitting in there pretending to be a pilot. Jennifer Patterson- My son is training to be a pilot right now, and yeah, it's hard. Jennifer Patterson- This is the future. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah, real pilot training is no fooling, but the ultralight class, because largely ultralights are a single person. Jennifer Patterson- Okay. Jennifer Patterson- You're only likely to kill yourself in them. Jennifer Patterson- Okay. Jennifer Patterson- So the FAA is like, ah, go ahead. Jennifer Patterson- Well, let me just say, Archer. Jennifer Patterson- But yeah.

[02:35:27] Jennifer Patterson- Archer has an electric taxi, four passengers, 60 to 90 minute trips. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah. Jennifer Patterson- It'll be in Texas, Florida, and New York. Jennifer Patterson- So that'll be a service, right? Jennifer Patterson- Yeah. Jennifer Patterson- Well, like right now, if you're rich, you could take a helicopter to the airport from Manhattan, right? Jennifer Patterson- Mm-hmm. Jennifer Patterson- I think that's what I mean, come on, we've all driven on American roads, and we've seen how American drivers operate. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah. Jennifer Patterson- And I'm sorry, the idea of letting your standard non-pilot trained person

[02:35:56] do this, the software better be damn good, because otherwise, you're going to have these things falling out of the sky. Jennifer Patterson- Yeah, it doesn't just affect the person in the plane, it's whoever's below the thing. Jennifer Patterson- The question is, can electric-based giant drones, these four-seater drones, so they're not burning fuel, even though they're piloted, like just as an Uber service, but going rooftop to rooftop, like what was always proposed in New York, except that helicopters are extremely loud and they're expensive and fragile. Jennifer Patterson- Right.

[02:36:25] Jennifer Patterson- And so these are more robust, more redundant machines. Jennifer Patterson- Like you could have a certain, you know, availability going rooftop to rooftop. Jennifer Patterson- Here is from the FAA. Here's the video. Jennifer Patterson- It's going to look just like this. Jennifer Patterson- The Jetsons! Jennifer Patterson- Oh. Jennifer Patterson- I'm sorry, when you lead up with the Jetsons, you've instantly lost the argument. Jennifer Patterson- I think the same guy that has the White House socials is doing this one. Jennifer Patterson- The Jetsons- All the way

[02:36:54] Jennifer Patterson- All this new technology, these Evitols that are Jennifer Patterson- That are going to take people from에- Jennifer Patterson- Alright, that's how you say that. Jennifer Patterson- That's no, nobody says it that way. Jennifer Patterson- OK. Jennifer Patterson- Is that Scott Bessette? Jennifer Patterson- I think it is. Jennifer Patterson- Innovate in America Jennifer str Rapid Начale- There we gonna innovate with Evitols. Jennifer Patterson- Okay. JenniferACK- I did see a flying robot vacuum at CES that can- like has little drones that lives- Jennifer Patterson- Well, what good is a flying vacuum wrapping up? Jennifer subjected the stairs to get it up for the stairs. Oh, the stairs.

[02:37:23] The Dalek problem, yes. I am going to fall over. I'm sorry, that was Sean Duffy. I would have dominated the world, but I had a curb in my way. They all look the same to me. Hey, here's a big story. Now, you mentioned the Academy Awards are still on network television, but will not be by 2030. They'll be on YouTube. This year, YouTube surpassed Disney, not this year, last year, 2025, Disney, Paramount, and Warner in ad revenue.

[02:37:51] It is now the number one media platform. $40 billion in ad revenue. Remember when it was ad-free? Yeah, those days have long gone. It's more than Disney, NBC, Paramount, and Warner Brothers' Discovery together. Together, yeah. Because all of those people are also on YouTube. Yeah. Well, that's true, but I think it's pretty clear. I mean, as you pointed out, YouTube TV is 85 bucks a month now.

[02:38:21] It's cable. Yeah. Exactly. So all those people are still also on YouTube. Yeah. I knew YouTube had it, though. So my husband is the absolute least tech forward person ever. Hates, actually hates technology, and only got an iPhone like eight years ago. And he now watches more YouTube than regular TV. That's what happens. And it's like, that's because it has all the niche. The regular TV is- It's niche. Yeah.

[02:38:49] If you want Alaska fishing guide videos- Exactly. You go to YouTube. You go watch them on YouTube. And he follows like these motorbike, camping motorbike influencers, like who go all over the world and do amazing trips. And he's living vicariously watching them. And he wants to poop in a bucket just like them, right? He wants to live in the middle of nowhere with no technology, except for YouTube. As long as I get YouTube, I'll go on. As long as you got YouTube.

[02:39:16] That's the secret reason we've got satellite. But you hit on the key thing about YouTube is every long tail culture you could imagine. Exactly. It's in there somewhere. Exactly. Everybody's YouTube experience is theirs. Including us. Including us. And that's remarkable. I mean, during lockdown, I started watching a channel called The Outdoor Boys. And it's a bloke in Alaska who basically goes out, as Jennifer said, you know, goes out into the wilderness

[02:39:43] and builds his own campfires and the rest of it. And yeah, it is cable now because you've got a list of channels you're subscribed to. And you just check on those and see what comes up. The Ignoble Prizes, which I have always loved every year, is moving out of the U.S. They're moving to Switzerland because they don't think it's safe in the U.S. This is from The Reg. They used to do it at Harvard,

[02:40:13] MIT, and Boston. The next one's going to be in Zurich. Mark Abrahams, the founder and ceremonies MC, said, during the past year, it's become unsafe for our guests to visit the country. We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners or the international journalists who covered the event to travel to the USA this year. It's going to be an issue with the World Cup. It's going to be an issue with the Olympics, which are a few years off. The MVP summit is next week. And the number of non-U.S.

[02:40:42] people going to the summit now has dropped off hugely. I mean, it's a huge issue for Hacker Summer Camp as well. I mean, a lot of hackers aren't coming to... which was last week, the Game Developers Conference, a lot of companies didn't go because it was in the U.S. You put a grandmother in jail for months for no particular reason. And same thing, just let her go one day. You scare a lot of people. No, I mean, it was interesting. I was at RSA last year and I was speaking to

[02:41:12] Sophos, which is essentially now a Canadian company. And they told their staff, you don't have to go, but we would like you to. So, you know, we're giving you that get out because crossing the borders these days is tricky. And as I say, DEFCON, Black Hat, B-Sides is coming up next weekend. A lot of European hackers are staying away because just in case, you know, it's like, yeah, I mean, it's like Hutchins

[02:41:42] who saved, you know, who killed off an entire virus system was picked up in DEFCON because of something he'd done as a teenager. On the way out. By the way, Marcus Hutchins was one of the keynoters at the Zero Trust World. But we had to leave before he spoke. We didn't get to see his talk. But it's... He's a great chap. Yeah. I mean, I have a photo of him. We were doing a data sharing because with the DEFCON badges that year, you had to share with a certain number of people. And I got a picture

[02:42:11] of us sharing data. And he's a lovely chap. He's gone a bit influencer-late, but it's a real problem because a lot of the top talent isn't coming to the US anymore because they're worried about border controls. And all it takes is one RC border patrol officer to get you in a whole world of trouble. Yeah, with no recourse. Yeah, exactly. Not all as well in Switzerland, though. They did... This is also

[02:42:41] from the register. They did an e-voting pilot. Unfortunately, 2048 ballots, an interesting number, cannot be counted because they couldn't be decrypted. Oops. Oops. You know, they were very secure. So secure that the official place is key. We mean it. Three USP sticks were used all with the correct code, but none of them worked.

[02:43:12] So, you know... Yeah, what with the proton mail scandal in Switzerland at the moment? Oh, yes. And it's not exactly the best. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of iffy. Also, the Swiss are really uptight. They make the Germans look relaxed. I went to a press conference in Switzerland and the bloke announced... He came in 10 minutes late, was just like, I'm very sorry, I was busy doing something.

[02:43:42] And one of the journalists said, oh, polishing your Nazi gold, were you? This guy was Instabanned. You're right. Yeah, you don't say that. Yeah. Even if it's true. Well, and as I often do with an in memoriam, you know, it's one of the things we've been doing this for so long that many of the people who were young when we started are now passing away. And at the age of 92, the Turing Award winning computer scientist who invented quicksort Tony Hoare,

[02:44:11] C-I-R, Hoare has passed. But he was 92. But we should probably mention that because he was... It was a good life and well lived. Yes. You know, I mean, he did some really fundamental work. He said, there are two ways of constructing a software design. One is to make it so simple, there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

[02:44:42] Very inspired. He will be missed, but we are grateful to him for quicksort, which is... And he got the Turing Award, which is the tech equivalent of the Oscars. That's right. Speaking of which... The guy who takes the blame for the null, he says that was the worst mistake I ever made. The null? Yeah, the null was the most expensive mistake. He made the idea that a Boolean is not just true or false, but could also be a denull. A null? And coding around nulls, man, is hard.

[02:45:11] Like it's just like a sheer amount of code to cope with a null and turn Tony Hoare years ago just said, worst mistake I ever made was introducing the null. Isn't that... It's kind of like Tim Berners-Lee was interviewed and he's like, what's the biggest thing about the World Wide Web that you didn't get? He goes, I have no idea why cats are so popular. You've obviously never had one. He introduced null references in Algal and it's referred to as the billion dollar mistake. At least that's

[02:45:41] what he called it. That's the one. Yep. Because of course... He thinks a big man to own up to. Yeah. Sorry about the billion. He said it's because it was so easy to implement. A lot of people got jobs though, probably. A lot of people unemployed because of that, probably. Kept a lot of people busy. That's true. That's true. All right. Hey, thank you, Richard Campbell. We'll see you on Wednesday. Really appreciate your spending time with us on this Sunday. It's real close to St. Paddy's Day

[02:46:10] so got a little Irish. Oh, a little Irish something for Windows Weekly. Well, I'm going to make myself a corned beef so we can have corned beef and cabbage. Excellent. How about that? Lovely food. Yes. I mean, in San Francisco they had the parade yesterday and it was amateur hour in the pubs and I put out on Blue Skull and I just like, please tip your bartender because they're having a hell of a time of it. It was just crazy. Crazy. Richard, we'll see you

[02:46:40] Wednesday with something a little something Irish. Of course, you catch Richard on RunnersRadio.com where you also find .NET Rocks and if you like Richard's talks about all things scientific like his nuclear talk he does these deep dive geek talks on .NET Rocks. Is there a way to search for them? Just look for geek. Search for geek and you'll find them. Thank you Richard. Wonderful to see you. Take care. Jennifer Patterson-Tui Senior Tech Reviewer

[02:47:10] at The Verge. Always a pleasure to have you on. We'll catch you on Tech News Weekly every month with Micah Sargent. Yeah, always fun to be here even with the Oscars. Yeah. You go, now you can skip the ads so that's a good thing. I know. See all the all the dresses has it has started right? I believe it started 15 minutes ago so but don't watch don't start at the middle you want to see the opening number and all of that so yeah thank you Jennifer run out of here

[02:47:40] go go go are your kids watching you? Does your family watch it or is it just you? No, my family is thrilled that I haven't forced them to watch it yet see it used to be it's really interesting none of them are interested it used to be like a national holiday it was appointment viewing everyone had to go yeah everyone had to watch it and now yeah we're the few the proud people in our generation I know it's sad very sad but I still love it me too cling

[02:48:09] cling to it can't wait to watch it and of course wonderful see you Ian Thompson I'm glad you'd write in that column at Techfinitive letter from America and you'll catch his freelance writing all over the internet and he's on Blue Sky if you could figure out how to spell his name I-A that's the problem yeah I know my parents and I have had words put it that way always great to see you I'm sorry you know we used to have a studio and Ian and his wife would come up and they'd

[02:48:39] even go to the little English shop we had in town and buy more Marmite you know but not anymore oh they have such great Scotch eggs the best place to get Scotch eggs I've ever found in California really I like Scotch eggs is that a high bar I mean well there is that it's a bar there is a place there is a place in San Francisco they've just opened a British pub they're charging 15 bucks for a Scotch egg what does it dance what

[02:49:09] yeah egg sausage and breadcrumbs well exactly you know if I want to get screwed I want a kiss not a credit card receipt but you know it's just what do they call them bacon buddies bacon buns oh no bacon buddies the bacon buddies the standards yeah if it wasn't for the fact that American bacon is so bad bad bad bad bad have you found a back bacon sauce yet Jennifer or oh what sorry a back bacon sauce no I've not found

[02:49:38] bacon in this country it's impossible sausages either really hard good sausages up here we just go to the British butcher and literally buy all the things you need oh nice we had dedicated bitches for such a task I do think I'm just going to mention this I don't know if it'll satisfy but we get our bacon from a little Polish company called Nuskies N-E-U-S-K-E-S and they have triple cut triple thick butcher cut bacon at a ridiculously expensive price that looks suspiciously streaky

[02:50:07] yeah this doesn't look good let me show you Nuskies I just found a recipe for bacon buddies Nuskies is the place to get your bacon I bet you I don't know I don't know I'm just thinking it might be I found a place in Berkeley that does proper back bacon but they charge a dollar a slice and it's just like oh for goodness sake I love bacon but not that much I think Nuskies I think Nuskies is more than that I just bought 84 ounces for $130 how much is that?

[02:50:38] it's a lot yeah I mean I've cheated I've got a mate I've got a mate who works as a butcher they you know they will actually cut you the proper piece of pork so you can let it cure it's not really bacon is it? it's something else it's basically pork with a mild fat round whereas American bacon streaky bacon is just it's too thin a minuscule amount of meat

[02:51:06] and an awful lot of fat yeah Americans call it ham which you like Americans call it ham it's more like a ham or a pork belly Canadian bacon Canadian bacon's a little closer yeah they're both loin that said no one does hash browns like America that was a real you know or pancakes or pancakes or waffles well the Belgian stew waffles pretty well alright now you're making me hungry no I have I have ribs on the grill on the smoker

[02:51:36] I think I did this last time because it's like six hours so it's perfect the show's just long enough to smoke a brisket have you got a big egg or I have I have a smart smoker right now I'm testing the brisket smart smoker it's that it's brisk it oh I have a trigger I haven't been able to since we've been under construction but I want to get back to my briskets I love making a good brisket but yeah you get up at three in the morning this started

[02:52:05] it's a long process but the great thing about the smart one is you don't have you just it does it has uses algorithms to adjust the cook as you go so I just put the ribs on press go and come back six hours later and it's perfect brisket.ai so you know it's smart brisket.ai oh now I'm wondering maybe an AI barbecue wow and it's really not that expensive I want it $400 which compared to a Traeger

[02:52:35] Traeger is really expensive yeah it's AI powered wifi grill oh maybe a brisket is in my future yeah it's pretty good I've been testing it for a while I did a video on it a little while ago too oh good I'll go look at the review yeah but I'm hoping you mix your own sauce right did what sorry I hope you mix your own sauce I know you live in the south where it's a religion but yes and you have a paintbrush that you slop it on slop it on yeah I I'm not a purist

[02:53:05] barbecue person because to me barbecue means cooking burgers in the backyard which is what English people do and getting rained on while you do it yes but I'm learning I've never made a good brisket though that's very hard to do so I like to go to the local barbecue shops here which are pretty awesome so yeah you're in a I'm in a good spot for the barbecue yeah yeah it is remarkable that in the Bay Area you cannot get good barbecue it just barbecue and pizza

[02:53:34] are two things that the Bay Area does not do well I'm so jealous of you Everett and Jones is good Everett and Jones and Brinkley yeah yeah yeah I've been there that's the one where they're behind bars and they slide the food out and they put a piece of white bread on it and they slide it out under the bars yeah I've been there thank you everybody we do go eat go watch the Oscars whatever you want to do have a drink we do this show every Sunday

[02:54:04] from 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific 5 to 8 Eastern that's 2100 UTC you can watch us live YouTube Twitch TikTok no X Facebook LinkedIn and Kik or if you're a club member I hope you are in the club Twit Discord that's not the reason to join the club the reason to join the club is ad free versions of all the shows special programming we did our AI user group on Friday it was fantastic great interview with Cindy Cohn who is the executive director of Electronic Frontier Foundation she has a new book

[02:54:34] we did that on Thursday these are all club specials joining the club supports everything we do here and it's a great way to spend 10 bucks a month and get something I think pretty important so if you enjoy the education the entertainment and the company that you get from Twit please twit.tv slash club twit we'd love to have you in the club after the fact on demand versions of our shows available at the website twit.tv there's a YouTube channel actually there's a YouTube channel for every show we do you can just go to youtube.com slash twit

[02:55:04] to get a link to all of the different ones and then of course it is a podcast so you can subscribe audio or video or both your favorite podcast player do leave us a five star review let the world know when you've been around 20 years you're no longer the flavor of the month so it helps we've been we've been smoking this show for a long time it's a long slow cook thank you everybody for being here we'll see you next week thank you Jennifer Richard and Ian have a great evening another twit

[02:55:33] is in the can this is amazing but what I wanted to tell you my daughter has a very good study semester beitre laptop software handy internet so a master is really teuer ach sag ihr she can she can she can back you mean from the steuer but she she doesn't you don't have to no matter you don't have to Zauberwort Verlust Vortrag macht sie ganz einfach

[02:56:03] mit Wieso Steuer und wenn sie dann arbeitet heißt es Katsching das geht safe Wieso Steuer hol dir dein Geld zurück jetzt kostenlos ausprobieren