TWiT 1084: Don't Overcook the Asparagus - Us Tech Titans vs. China's Rising Innovators

[00:00:00] It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech and it's one of those special shows where I get two of my favorite people on and just let them vibe and it's gonna be a great one. Amy Webb is here, futurist from the Future Today Strategy Group. Harper Reid, AI guru and technologist from 2389.ai. We have lots to talk about. Trump and the CEOs going to China. A lot of AI news, Musk versus Altman. Google Invest.

[00:00:30] And SpaceX and a whole lot more. I'll tell you what, don't even worry about what we're gonna talk about. Just make sure you watch this show because TWIT is great. And next. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.

[00:00:53] This is TWIT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1084 recorded Sunday, May 17th, 2026. Don't overcook the asparagus.

[00:01:04] It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news and you are in luck. If you've never listened to this show or if you've listened for 21 years, that's how long we've been doing it. Either way, you're gonna be thrilled that we have Amy Webb here from the Future Today Strategy Group. Yep. That is me. It is I. FTSG. She's a futurist. Yeah.

[00:01:28] So good to see Amy. One of the smartest people in the world. And always welcome. And her buddy, it turns out the last time they were on, I didn't even know they knew each other. It turns out. Harper Reid and Amy go way back. Harper Reid, technologist, entrepreneur, and hacker at 2389.ai. Hello, Harper. Hello, Amy. Hello. When we have the two of you, we don't need anyone else. In fact, I'm just gonna relax, sit back and let you guys just jam. Harper, should we get this out of the way now?

[00:01:58] Oh, wait, should I never have the stuff? I always need the thing. There it is. This is how they know each other. Can you screenshot this and send it to the WhatsApp group? One second. There we go. The Leadership US Japan Program. Tell us about that, Amy. What is that? So I think Harper and I told you about this last time around. You did, but not everybody was here the last time.

[00:02:18] It's a terrific organization that brings together American leaders and Japanese leaders who actually live in other places around the world besides just Japan and the United States. And the point is to establish a network and relationships for the purpose of bringing the two countries more firmly together over time.

[00:02:42] And so and there are some I've I guess this is going almost my 10th year. You sort of do a week in Japan as a cohort and then you do a week in the United States or depending on what year it is, there's an alternate. You sort of alternate between the two. And yeah, and then you become a lifetime fellow, which is what Harper and I both are.

[00:03:06] And it's it's truly awesome that people are incredible, incredible people doing really meaningful things. Yeah. And we see each other in person throughout the year. And it's it's a great, great organization. You have to be under 40 to apply. And if anybody they raise the age a little bit. OK, it used to be 40. You don't have to speak Japanese.

[00:03:31] You do have to demonstrate leadership and have some kind of interest in Japan if you're not Japanese. But I can't say enough about it. It's it's really an incredible program. Does it involve going to small nightclubs to see hardcore punk bands at all? Yes, that's exactly what we do. That's what I do. That's what I do.

[00:03:52] I don't know if there's a general we, but I have I did do I did bring some of our at that point delegates to see a punk band in Seattle during our start our session there. But it's been really great and it's interesting because as you know, extensively this is a soft diplomacy program. And the thing about soft diplomacy is it shifts the target shift throughout the life's I guess life of these kind of programs.

[00:04:19] And so it's been really interesting just in the I guess seven years I've been involved how kind of the focus has shifted. And it's it's it's really fun to participate and meet people that you would never meet before. It's good. Yeah. And it's not just I was going to say we've got some like Marvel executives. We've got. Wow. Recognizable names that I'm not going to name out loud, but people you definitely have heard of recently in the Web. You've got me. You've got Harper. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:49] So I, you know, I imagine there's been a kind of a wrenching of the of the late lately of the diplomatic focus. What was everything going on in the world? In fact, that's our first. What do you mean? I don't know what's going on. I don't know. It seems like something's happening. The first topic is about China, because Trump and 16 something like that CEOs were in China this past week meeting with President Xi. President for life.

[00:05:19] She talking about was unprecedented, too. I don't know that there's been another time in history when we've had such a a group of CEOs like that traveling with a group of government officials. Pretty amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, one of them hitchhiked. Jensen Wong of Nvidia wasn't invited and complained about it. And the president said, we'll meet you in Alaska. We've got to stop for refueling.

[00:05:42] Jensen jumped on a PJ, flew up to Alaska, met Air Force One and joined the exodus. CEOs from Nvidia, Apple, Tim, Tim Apple was there, Exxon, Boeing, Qualcomm, Blackstone, Citigroup, Visa all there. Elon, Elon's son was there. Let's not forget about that. Oh, X. Yeah. That was and Elon was there, too. Right. He always brings his son with it. Yeah. There's a hilariously awful video of him.

[00:06:13] He's he's walking at a normal adult pace and his son is literally racing to keep up with him while Elon's got a death grip on his hand. Oh, which is Jensen was left off the list because he's Taiwanese and American. Nvidia's chips are made by TSMC. And the focus of this visit was actually not A.I. The focus was from China's point of view.

[00:06:41] You know, let's all agree that you're going to let us do what we want with Taiwan and you're going to stay out of the way. Yeah. So so that is why he was not not on the list. So why was so then the question is, why did they change their mind suddenly? And was it an affront to the Chinese that he was there? Very much so. Oh, interesting. You know, the way that these diplomatic visits get set up, they're coordinated and choreographed months in advance.

[00:07:08] And who's on the list is in where people are going to sit. I mean, that's the other thing like is literally it's a it's a complicated chess game just figuring out where people are going to sit because that message is so much. So any kind of addition of anybody last minute is really tricky, but especially somebody who from China's perspective as a political lightning rod was was, you know, tough.

[00:07:34] Well, and one of the deals that the Trump administration made was to clear the Nvidia chip sales to China, not the best, the H200, not the. Yeah, but that was already. Yeah, that's fine. But well, it's what's funny is the Chinese nobody in China would order one. Yeah, the Chinese have decided, no, we're going to do our own and screw you. Yeah. Look, China is we have ignored the whole world.

[00:08:03] I used to live there. This is why I brought it up, because you're an you're an expert on this. Yeah. Well, I don't know if I'm an expert on it, but China for years has been producing exceptional quality everything. They literally have 70% of the global market share for EVs and also have like literally 100 different EV companies. So good that America has had to ban them in the United States. They would undermine our own auto industry. Yeah, I've had a chance to drive in some of them. They're awesome.

[00:08:33] They are great cars and they're inexpensive, better mileage. And what's interesting is they are in the process of converting like all of those car companies are going to also start producing robots and drones. Right. So in fact, some say they're already better at bipedal robots than we are. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So anyhow, Chinese AI models are only a couple months behind ours at this stage. You think that close? Really?

[00:09:02] I think it depends on who you talk to. But again, I'm not an expert expert. Well, I've used Quinn, which is what is Quinn Huawei's or Xiaomi's. I can't remember. No, GLM is Xiaomi's. There's a lot of different. They're not quite there. Harper, what do you think? Well, you're also comparing them to you're comparing an open model that the weights are available with a closed. Yeah, I can run Quinn locally. That has untold tweaks to get it to be more effective on the back end that we don't know about. Right.

[00:09:33] Versus Quinn or GLM or Kimi or any of these that are. Kimi's very good too. Effectively free to run. Yeah. You know, and I think this is also one of the reasons why. I don't have enough GPU and RAM. Yeah. I have to run a highly quantized version of GLM locally with 128 gigs of RAM, but it still can run it and it's open. Yeah. And in many cases it's uncensored, like they've removed the Chinese censorship from it.

[00:09:59] Well, I think there's a funny thing that happens, which is we like to think that, you know, China is behind or they say, oh, the models are behind. But we don't have any open models that are better. We sometimes pop up like a Gemma pops up or like a Facebook Llama 3 will pop up or whatever. GPT-120. Yeah, GPT-OSS will pop up and that happens, but then they're quickly beaten by the Chinese open model. And so I think you have to actually compare oranges to oranges in this.

[00:10:28] I have to point out both Anthropic and OpenAI say that's because they're distilling our models. Yeah, but they distilled their own models off of themselves and also the internet. That's true. Everybody's distilling. I think that's a funny critique. Hey, they stole from us. We just can't have it both ways. You know what I'm saying? Like you either, it either is stealing or it's not stealing. And if it's stealing, then let's talk about it. But you can't be like they stole from us, but we didn't steal from you. Right.

[00:10:57] Which I feel like is a kind of the narrative. I just think we need to really be, if the US really wants to have a, let me say it differently. I find it very interesting that China has followed the rule or the kind of pattern that the US followed in the past of releasing what amounts to a free technology to the world. And the US is with open models, et cetera. And the US has been reliant on closed models. And so if you talk to entrepreneurs outside the US, a lot of them are relying on these open

[00:11:27] Chinese models. They're not relying on closed US models. And if we're, and it seems like a big blind spot of the US entrepreneurs to assume that, you know, Southeast Asia, you know, APAC, et cetera, even Europe, Middle East is going to suddenly, you know, use open AI, Anthropic, Facebook, Google models when they can get something that is, let's say it's six months behind or even a year behind for effectively free that they have control of, you know, which is like the Linuxization, so to speak, of these models,

[00:11:57] just spreading it out for free. I find that really interesting. That's correct. And if you couple that with the amount of infrastructure investment that's happening, you know, our, our hyperscalers are going to invest, what is it like $800 billion on paper right now in building data centers. They're, they're burning cash because we don't have a national strategy. It's all being left to the, to the, you know, market to figure out. That's not what China's doing.

[00:12:27] China's got a plan. Um, you, China has a history of announcing plans and not making good on them, but that's actually not been the case over the past couple of cycles. So they're building out, you know, everybody's going to have wifi broadband. Um, so, so they're making it so that everybody can participate. And the models that people have access to are not cost prohibitive, prohibitive the way they can be in the U S. So that just creates this interesting circumstance where you've got significantly more distributed

[00:12:56] access and people can around and find out, you know, like you, you just time to play. And the other really interesting thing is the conversation about AI in the U S is all about like the robots coming to take my job and then murder me in my sleep. Um, you know, it's all like, it's all apocalyptic or it's this like utopian wonderfulness that will happen. China's having a much more pragmatic conversation.

[00:13:21] So if you talk to just everyday people there and I do, um, they're more worried about, um, whether or not they're going to be competitive in the marketplace. So they're not like all the jobs are going away. They're more like, man, I really need to experiment, get better with this. Cause I want to make sure I get the best possible job. Not, but, but, but not like there are no jobs. Does that make sense? So it's just a very, very pragmatic, different approach that. I think that for the many things China does wrong, that I disagree with.

[00:13:51] I think this is one area that we could study and learn a lot from.

[00:14:22] Yeah. I think, which is the only way we've gotten around. And so I have a lot of, you know, we could, and that would, and I think

[00:14:52] would have, and I think some of the, I think some of the things that we're here So we're not even trying to achieve that in terms of the economy, we, um, I'm very impressed with him and his way of doing that. And also how people who work there seem to love it in a way that seems like I have friends that have worked at Amazon for a long time. They don't love it. They're there for money or Facebook. And anyone know what NVIDIA is like, it's hard, but I really like it. And I don't understand how they created that environment because everything I read about it seems like it's horrible to work at. But people seem to really like they're true believers, which I always admire when you have a leader that's able to instill that.

[00:15:22] And even if that means bending reality to their wants, like he's done a good job. Okay. So I have something for you to Google, Leo. Yes, I'm good at that. I'm going to have to spell it. Although I don't use Google, but I'll do this. You mean search the web for. Yeah. I don't use Google anymore either. Yeah. I'll kaggy it. It doesn't really work. And I love that their logo is a G. They were like, what if we used a G? No one in the search space uses a G. Okay.

[00:15:49] It is M-A-L-E-O-U-S space AI. And you want to hit the Amazon link. Malleous. Yes. It's a robot for AI robot for kids. So this is an example. The names sound scary. M-A-L means bad. And also for the elderly. Okay. I'm elderly. This is an example of one of these little, this is a deep seek agent that you can talk

[00:16:16] to and has a very fast real time AI agent on it. That's pretty good. Does it go to the cloud or is it a local agent? It goes to the cloud. Okay. It's all via, I took it apart and reverse engineered it. It's all MQTT posted to some endpoints in China. A lot of other people have done this as well, but what's interesting about it. Is it always listening to me and sending China everything I say? Oh yeah. And you have to hook it to your wifi. This is definitely for, for people who really want to do that, but it's free.

[00:16:46] How long before the FCC bans this? It costs 40 USD. What? And there's no account. There's no signup. There's nothing. It just works. And it is pretty effective. Like it, pretty effective. Like I just wanted, a friend told me about this, this friend of mine in Shanghai was like, Hey, there's all of these small little AI admin assistant things. They're all little hardware pieces. And there's, and if you look at the recommended products from this, there's dozens of these. You can just see, they all start to look the same. There's little robots.

[00:17:13] There's also, this is not currently available, but, but I think to kind of what, what Amy is saying, like they've made it. So it is cost effective to build really interesting technology that isn't just some insane $200 a month subscription for the mediocre version. That was literally $40. Like I paid $40 with it. It came, I hooked it to my wifi, like a crazy person. And then immediately started talking to it. And I think that. Doesn't it seem like this is just give inviting China into your network? Yeah.

[00:17:43] But I think you're missing the point though, Leo, because the point isn't that China's in your network. Like, like you already have Gov lights and like all sorts of other stuff. Like they don't have to have some $40 device. The point is, is that this is a free AI thing. That's very effective and it's competitive with, with. Okay. So this one's unavailable, but what about the Heyo Zoki AI desk robot from deep seek? This one I can buy and have tomorrow. Yeah. Get it. Let's try it. It's fun. It's a little rabbit adjacent. Is it not? I have a rabbit.

[00:18:11] I did buy the rabbit because it can talk to my open claw, which I don't have, but I had, I had my agent simulate open claw so that rabbit doesn't know any better. Yeah. And I could talk to it through. So, okay. Show you don't know anything about this one, but this is also DC deep seek powered. So I figure it's probably just if you look for the deep seek powered ones, they're for the most part free and easy and they're pretty good. I would not, I know you're not going to use it for real work, you know, but it, but it's

[00:18:39] like, it's a $20 AI assistant that is pretty funny to use. And this is what we're, this is what we're dealing with because that's distributed all over the world. Whereas open AI, Anthropic, they don't have hardware that you can give to your parent or your kid. No, in fact, all we have is this crappy Amazon echo plus thing, which has a sassy voice and then tries to sell me stuff. Uh, or, or Siri, which is just stupid.

[00:19:07] I, in 28, 17 or so, um, we were working with Microsoft. This is, I'm not divulging anything now because it's been a while. Um, statute of limitations. So it's been almost how IP worked. Could you imagine? Yeah. No kidding. Um, but they had multiple teams trying to figure out AI and they were incredibly siloed. Um, I think if you look at some of the research that was coming out of Microsoft, they had some

[00:19:35] of the best at that point, they had some of the best research on things like machine writing, reading comprehension and, um, recognition and NLP and stuff like that. But at any rate, what happened was they got fixated on a device and wanted to get a sub $40 Bluetooth Alexa competitor, Amazon, you know, echo competitor in the market and lost and, and

[00:20:00] sort of lost where, you know, lost the, the, the, uh, I don't know, lost their path, lost their footing. Um, you've got all, and it's hard to bring hardware to the market. Uh, so it's interesting to me in the United States that we keep having hardware failures over and over again, which is what's happened. You don't see that in China. And that's been true in China and Japan where Harper and I both spent a ton of time, um,

[00:20:29] because things are more open and there is significantly more competition. 100 different companies trying to bring EVs to the market. That's, that's in completely unfathomable. We cannot wrap our heads around that in the United States. Um, but isn't it ironic because they're communist and we're capitalist, but that sounds like they've got free more, more of a free market than we do. Is that crazy? I didn't see the air quotes there, Leo.

[00:21:00] No, free market. No, I meant on the, on the capital and the communist, like there is, there needs to be air quotes around maybe that whole sentence. So you think Adam Smith would look at China and say, that's what I was talking about. China has adapted capitalism in a different way than we have. And one could argue, again, there's a lot going wrong there, but you could argue that there's a better approach. We are seeing other alternative and better approaches to capitalism and to the markets

[00:21:27] for the purpose of like innovation and competition outside the U S that it's ridiculous that we are this AI is a very long horizon technology. It's also been in the works for a very long time, but in terms of like getting stuff, into the commercial sector, it's only been a couple of years and we only have a couple of players. It should be the opposite right now at this stage. We should have a hundred different legitimate companies in every single part of the ecosystem. And that is not what's happening. We have a couple of dominant players.

[00:21:55] Chairman said, let a thousand flowers bloom. George Bush said, let a hundred points of light. There's a really good book that I think talks a lot about this by Dan Wong called breakneck. Yeah, really, really good. I've got it right over there. It's a great, very effective, very great book, but it really puts this idea that we have migrated and he doesn't do it. He does a very good job of not saying one is better than the other more just saying, this is kind of where we are and we may need to fix it.

[00:22:24] We may not, but like we need to choose one way or the other. But he just says the U.S. is a lawyer state and China is an engineer state. And so you have what kind of comes from that. Like you have a lot of laws and regulation in the U.S., which is like all we talk about. But if you look at our leaders, a hundred percent of our leaders are all lawyers. So of course, it's like my famous economist friend of mine always tells me, you know, never ask a hairstylist if you need a haircut, right? It's like you do what tools you have in front of you.

[00:22:52] And whereas China's leaders are all engineers. So it's going to be much easier for them to say, my tools in front of me are to light up a billion solar companies and have the competition fight to see which one of the best solar happens, which is where all the solar innovation is happening. Whereas we are saying, oh, well, we need to regulate to get solar either to out there or to kill wind turbines or whatever thing is happening. But the point being that like we're using the tools that we have available and it might not be the right tool for this moment in time. A hundred percent.

[00:23:22] The tools of regulation like this is going to open up a can of worms, so I don't want to do that. Other than to say that this is not a moment to regulate. We cannot and should not attempt to regulate AI. There are other ways forward, but it requires making some tough decisions with regard to who can make money and how and how the returns get distributed and stuff like that.

[00:23:50] China's just not they're just not operating in the same space. There are plenty of other problems, you know, and also China is not going to be the one innovating and creating brand new stuff. They are going to fast follow. But that fast follow strategy is really smart when you combine that with this long term vision and resources put against bringing everybody online. You know, I would love to see the United States invest similarly to get everybody.

[00:24:14] Look, I mean, like all these tools are really great unless you have no service in your house or, you know. Yeah, yeah. You just then then cool you're you you're learning about AI and you can't use any of it. You know, what was so what was the goal of the Trump summit this week? Yeah, um, it depends on who you ask from my point of view. There's a big war happening that the United States launched.

[00:24:42] So there's, you know, that and China and Iran historically have relations, whereas we don't. So I think that there was some amount of let's see if we can figure some of this out. China is very, very where this is a little bit of a little bit of 1914, where we had all of these hot spots around the world starting to heat up because there were these political

[00:25:09] political problems all over the place there. So it feels a little bit like that right now. And you could you could look at this as like she may she's trying to may see this as an opening to take Taiwan by force, which they've certainly talked about. Um, they could see this as an opening to use Taiwan as leverage for something else. You know, there's a lot of that happening.

[00:25:34] There's certainly a lot of concern among the US tech industry about losing Taiwan. I mean, Apple. Well, yeah, because we don't get there's no chips anywhere else. They're all made by TSMC. And it's presumed if China if China did invade Taiwan that they would blow up the chip plants to prevent China from getting the technology. I mean, TSMC says they would. I don't know if they would. Yeah, that's that sounds implausible. It's not just the technology. It's the people who know how to use the technology.

[00:26:02] So it's it's not just those resources. You've got this incredibly trained, highly skilled group of people who are able to to work in these places. You can't. Yeah, that's part of the reason why it's really hard to stand up a factory like that in the US right now, because we just don't have highly, highly, highly skilled people yet to do that work. And if we do, they are they are burdens, the wrong word, but they're burdened by regulation laws, labor laws, et cetera, that are not from today. Yeah. Right.

[00:26:31] They're from factories from 100 years ago. And they were made for very, very good reasons. Like these were made to protect workers and children, et cetera. And so we have this stuff that, you know, China never had to go through that as a country. They they they were able to define their labor laws, which, you know, some are bad, some are good in the modern age. And I think that just that's, you know, this is kind of a lot what the Dan Wong book is about, which I highly recommend. I can't recommend enough if you're interested in seeing that. Yeah.

[00:26:57] What I like about it is a lot of the books on China, you know, Apple in China or chip wars are very good. But at the end, they basically are shouting, China will never beat the US. And it just is kind of like this hyperbolic kind of thing where it's like Dan Wong is just saying, look, these are two different systems. Here's the historical reasons why they happened. And here's some comparisons across that might be helpful. And I just thought that was a nice, less hyperbolic way of looking at these two systems and how they interface, et cetera. I remember visiting China in 2009.

[00:27:26] My only I was a Chinese studies major in college. I love that. I never knew that. Yeah. No, I love the culture. I learned Mandarin, which I've, of course, forgotten because unless you use it every single day, it's the pearl of spoken word. I in 2009 visited China and I had kind of come to the opinion that while the 20th century was the American century,

[00:27:53] I think we all agree that the 21st century might well be the Chinese century. Yeah. And our guide who was a Brit expat said, oh, no, you don't understand the economic issues besetting China. This is 2009. We'll keep it from becoming the Chinese century. Is that still true or is that not the case? There certainly were economic issues. There's birth rate issues. There are problems in China. There's of course the human rights issue. I don't know if that has anything to do with the economics of it.

[00:28:22] Do you think this could be, it sounds like you're just painting a picture of a Chinese century? Uh, well, centuries a long time in the year, 20 decade. Let's have a decade. Decade. Yeah. Um, I think it really depends on, look, I'm like a pragmatist. I just, so like if I were to look at where a lot of Western democracies are and I would include Japan in this, um, and I look at the issue too, huge birth rate issue.

[00:28:51] They're also having lots of internal political issues. They just launched a brand new party called meet. I meet. I something, um, meet. I in Japanese means future. Um, so it's a, it's a guy. Um, and, uh, the focus is on like AI, so it's fine, but like Japanese, I don't know, with apologies to everybody who might be listening to this, who is Japanese, like talk about stubborn, like just absolute unwillingness to, to, to try anything new. A lot of people are, I have the impression they're tradition bound.

[00:29:21] Is that? Uh, no, it's just, just like stubbornness, but that's not across the board, but it is. No, in fact, some Japanese people are very forward looking and very, uh, Yeah. I'm mostly talking about men of us like older men still run things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not, not younger people, but, um, but the point is there's so much pendulum swinging in a lot of these countries because of, uh, extreme views going back and forth and China is just plowing ahead.

[00:29:51] So the lack of uncertainty in China is partially what's going to help that country go forward. And I don't think it's great to have a dictator benevolent or not. So I'm not saying that, but, but it does reduce some of the, like worked for Singapore, you know, constant back and forth. We're going to invest in coal. We're going to invest in EVs. Wait, no, sorry. We're investing in four years. We, uh, we decide something else. Yeah. And that makes, um, that makes the business climate like impossible to work in.

[00:30:21] Yeah. We look, I'm in the room with leaders of major companies and just about every industry and their boards. And basically what I'm hearing people say is we're just, we're on pause for the next three years or two and a half years. So a lot of these companies outside of AI, which is a thing are not investing in innovation because they don't know what's going to happen. And so it's every, everybody's just waiting. That's a terrible situation to be in. Isn't this almost a global situation?

[00:30:50] Every polity in the world is struggling with the future because the future is so uncertain. That's that, that is an excuse. So the answer is no, you should always be focused. You need, you need your near-term strategy and you need the longer term. And there's even if you have no idea what's going to happen. Let me give you an example. Um, are you familiar with Toto toilets? Yes, I have many of them.

[00:31:14] We have, we, we actually have the, the Toto that South Park made fun of, um, in our, in our bathroom. I miss it. We moved and we, we left our Totos behind. And that was speaking of behinds. And that was a big mistake. These opened up, they were warm, they blew at you. They squirted at you. They did everything. They did everything, but play music. We didn't have the musical ones, but yeah, they're, they're, uh, they're awesome, but they're fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:41] But one of the things that they did was, um, the, the same porcelain coating that is what makes it Toto toilet really great. It turns out it's also, they've been able, they'd been researching and figuring out how to apply that same exact technology for printing Silicon chips. Right. So, um, the point, but like they discovered this a long time ago and then just kept chipping away at it and continue to invest in innovation because at some point they, they like wanted to be ready.

[00:32:09] And their stock is through the roof now because they make the interconnects that every data center needs. That's right. So that is what I do not see us companies doing. I do not see them investing in the future or, and fine. So like this technology may or may not ever actually work, but you're going to learn so much in the process and everybody who's a part who touches that in any way is going to level up in how they're thinking. It's going to, you know, they were just lucky.

[00:32:37] No, but, uh, no, there's plenty of examples. Even if they were, you have to kind of manufacture luck. You can't just like my favorite example. If you have to do something, you can't be lucky and no opportunities exist unless you start to push in the doors. This is, this has been a, so my favorite example of this for a Japanese company is Yamaha. They make everything from musical instruments to rowboats, to speedboats, to motorcycles. And like, they just make everything. There are no companies like that in America.

[00:33:05] Well, there, there are conglomerates that that's a little tricky too, because General Electric made everything. It wasn't a good thing. Yeah. I think the, the, what I'm trying to point out is, and I don't want to name any company names, but we have a lot of us companies that historically did a phenomenal job of doing some research and research, you know, and it doesn't, it doesn't affect your balance sheet. It doesn't cost that much money to do research, but you have to organize the company in the right way.

[00:33:35] So that like some of that starts to spiral out and you, maybe you get a new product. It's fine. If you don't, you get new learnings that then help you think through the next thing. And we just don't have the great labs that used to exist. And I think that's a huge, we've become like, so like America is like obsessed with optimization. Like we must optimize everything all the time at all costs. And the great irony is like, that's a hundred percent of what China used to do, you know, and we flip-flopped a little bit.

[00:34:05] Well, I need to take a break. This is such a good conversation. I think so important. I don't want to interrupt it. So hold, hold that thought, Harper. And I, I think the T is this way, but okay. And then I don't know what that is. That's orthogonal. I thought, I don't know. I would actually kind of wonder if either of you have an opinion of what comes after this summit,

[00:34:33] whether anything was accomplished and what comes after the summit. We're gonna take a little break. So Amy can leak Harper. I, by the way, this has already been an expensive show and I blame you Harper. I'm sorry, this is so gross. No, no. I had my power bar already, so I'm okay. I bought the robot that you mentioned before the show, the Ricci. And then I just bought this thing that's gonna be a spy for China in my house. Yeah. That's what we're talking about. Yeah. Don't you basically,

[00:35:02] are you giving it administrative access to your network now and deep? No, but, but if you read the reviews on that, that site, there is a perfect, a perfect review. I don't even know how to say it. Like, you know when you read a review of something and you're like, this person does not know what they're talking about. What he's talking about? I think I read that review. And the one where it's like, they hacked me. Yeah. You have to, you have to type in your password, which is 192.168.1.1.

[00:35:32] They hacked me. And you're just like, oh, maybe, but like, maybe not what you think. Should I put it inside a VPN or maybe tail scale or something and keep it out? Yeah. I'll put it on a separate LAN segment. Just play with it. Hook it to a hot spot on your phone. Don't worry about it. Don't hook it to your real big network and just kind of play with it because it's not, it's, it's, it is a little, it's like fast fashion of electronics. Yeah. It's not there to last forever. Yeah. This is not a high quality product.

[00:36:00] And honestly, I don't really care if the Chinese know my wifi password. So what? They've got nothing to hide. They're going to come and they're going to take all of your stuff. Just don't hack my Toto. That would be. They're already in your router anyway. They're in your router. They made my router. I know. They're made everything in my house. Yeah. They're made the computer I'm using right now. It's a great computer. It's a great computer.

[00:36:28] Um, anyway, we're going to take a break and come back. This is why we love having Harper and Amy on. I hope you're enjoying this week in tech brought to you this week by ThreatLocker. Now, you know why you need ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker is zero trust platform delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions. They've always done endpoint protection, right? And nothing better than zero trust for, for locking down your network. But now they've expanded this. They announced this, I think at our sack.

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[00:39:49] We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. What you got there? A little Lego miner? Devo. What's he got, a vacuum? Devo guy. Oh, he's Devo. We are, he's got a, you must whip it guy. Yeah. Yeah. He is Devo. I thought he had a whip, but I wasn't going to say it. Now I see, he's got a planter on his head. Yep. And he's got a whip in his hand. Who else could it be but Devo? Yep.

[00:40:19] Lego Devo. I always have fun stuff to show you. You know what's cool about Lego? You can design your own Lego set. What's that? Oh, that's what I mean, I reach you. I can't, what, did it break? What's going on? No, it doesn't, it just doesn't have power. Oh, the battery died. You know, I had, what was it? The OBS bot. And I've had so many of these things that have, what was it? It looked just like that.

[00:40:44] It had the eyes and it went around and they turned off the server a few years ago. I know. I have been thinking a lot about- These are just toys. Let's face it. Well, when you buy hardware, I was just talking to a friend about this. He bought all this WeMo stuff. Yep. And WeMo was just shut down, right? Yep. So sad. And he was just like, what do I do? And I was kind of like, well, what do you want? But the way he described it, he's not a technical, technical person.

[00:41:11] He's been involved in tech companies for a long time, so he knows his way around it. But he was like, I want autonomy over the hardware. I want to be able to hack it if the service goes down. Yep. And then I was like, just do ESP 32s. Yep. It'll be easy. But it's like funny because that would have been an asinine thing to recommend two years ago. But now he'll just be like, Claude, here's an ESP 32 switch.

[00:41:42] Exactly. What do I do with it? It's kind of amazing. And we do this quite a bit. They, anytime I get a new piece of hardware, especially all this Instagram hardware that's out there, we will rip it apart and kind of see what it's made out of. And if it is an ESP 32 board, you can typically rip the firmware and decompile it and kind of basically get an idea of what happens because they don't encrypt the hardware. Right. I'm wondering because the ESP 32 has a number of trigger words, high ESP is the default,

[00:42:12] but there's a couple of Chinese. And then one of them is Alexa. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder, is this the chip inside an echo? No. Why would it know Alexa? I'm guessing that they trained like, so you're talking about, I think open wake word. Yeah. You can use it. Well, that's what I'm using now is open wake word to train it to say hi Kenobi. Yeah. So did you check out the, the, the Google or the Colab notebook? Yeah. The Python notebook where you can train your own word. Yes. Exactly. You can do it pretty well where you don't have to say the word. Well, I did.

[00:42:42] I had Kokoro, which is a text to speech synthesizer. Very good. Generate like 2000, both Hey Kenobi. And then you also have to do false positives. So generate a lot of just random stuff or Hey, you know, Hey Schenectady. And then, so there's a lot of training involved. And I have all those samples still. I just have to, I have to buckle down and finish it. It's kind of a pain in the butt. I tried to, I tried to do one that said, Hey Richie.

[00:43:11] And they said, they said use Alexa because it's got the most, that's probably why it has Alexa. Cause it has so much training. There's such a long history. I was on a call with a, with a company the other day that has a big G in it. And the guy kept saying, talking about Google. Cause it was from Google and his, his Google home kept going off. Like we're talking multiple times. I know. It was so funny. Cause I was just like, what a. I've muted, I've muted all of the smart devices in this room. Yeah.

[00:43:39] If not, they would go off constantly. I just noticed your chair. You look like a child. Leo. I just switched. I had one of these fancy office chairs and I've just switched it back to my Dr. Evil chair that I had in the old studio. I have to turn around and show you the back. Wow. Because I'm an elderly fellow. I'm also very interested in all this stuff from the point of view of. Uh, it's going to be a support to me in my old age.

[00:44:11] And so for instance, at some point I talked about this the other day, somebody's going to come and take away my car keys. They're going to say, dad, you shouldn't be driving anymore. And I'm just hoping by then I will have an automobile that I will just get in and say, take me to the supermarket. I love Waymo's. I have a good hack to get a Waymo to LAX from anywhere in LA. What's the hack?

[00:44:36] And is it, would you get dropped off at the LAX, uh, parking lot, which is a short bus from LAX. Ah. And it's on the Waymo map. So you can, cause otherwise they won't take you to the airport because there's no fees. And so there was one day where I had some extra time and I was like, I'll see if I can get all the way to LAX. And I just was like, take me to the LAX parking garage. And it was like, got it. And I put on my, I think I was listening to some classical music or whatever, rolled down the windows and had a wonderful, very relaxed ride, doing nothing.

[00:45:06] Called a bunch of friends on FaceTime, like an absolute insane person. That's where I'm calling from. Exactly. There's no driver. And then, and then I had to walk a little ways, but it was like a very pleasant experience. You see the DDoS attack, uh, the guy in San Francisco. It was such a great idea. Actually I have a Waymo story in here because apparently, um, uh, they have, uh, added Waymo

[00:45:30] to Atlanta and, uh, empty Waymo's invade Atlanta neighborhood circle cul-de-sac for hours with no passengers. Did somebody do this twice again? It happened in San Francisco in a neighborhood. But it was a joke. It was a guy who like got a bunch of his buddies to all order them at the same time. It was fake. It was a DDoS. It was like, oh, that's hysterical. Yeah. This is so the, I thought the one in San Francisco happened because of the directions. You couldn't make a left turn and they, they honored.

[00:46:00] No, no. This was a guy who got a bunch of friends together and they all take a look at this. Uh, you can play this. Uh, this is from channel two in Atlanta. I love this by the way. This is so good. Wayward Waymo's. What happened? They just got stuck in there. This is the type of thing that I cannot wait to happen. Like, I love it. Like it's my favorite thing. Like, could you imagine being like, I got to go get a Waymo and then, you know, it's coming from some graveyard. Look at all the Waymo's. Just look at all. See, look at this. Oh my God. This is not a DDoS.

[00:46:29] This couldn't be. It's beautiful. Think it is. I think it's cause there's so, I don't know. It's a circle. I don't even think it matters. Why? I just love it as a thing that is happening. Like, could you imagine being the person that's like the robots are here? Watch out. The name of the court is Battle View Drive. So I think it's appropriate. Let's call every Waymo in Atlanta and send it to Battle View Drive. And then, of course, all the local reporters show up. Oh God. They got to do this. Steve. Steve. Oh no.

[00:46:58] Oh, he shouldn't have done that. He put a little child thing in there and it's blocked him and now they can't go. Oh no. That was mean, Steve. Local reporter causes Waymo confusion. We need to give these Waymos some free time. Give them some space. Amy, are you better? Are you feeling okay now? I just, uh, New Band-Aid. Decided to replace things. Yeah. I'm sorry.

[00:47:26] By the way, Amy at South by Southwest had a funeral. I did. I mean, I didn't have. Well, no, it wasn't your funeral. It was a funeral for your yearly, uh, wonderful. Our annual report. That's right. Annual report. Yep. Tell us about that. They got a lot of attention. It did. Um, I, we, so we have been producing this trend report for 20 years. It would've been the 19th year. You've been sending copies and I love it. Yeah.

[00:47:53] And we still, we're still, we use that information to do our work. So it's not that we're not doing it anymore, but a compendium that's a thousand pages long. It's a PDF is not useful to anybody and worse. There is, there is so much happening right now that I need people to unhook from what's easy and engage with what's more difficult. So a trend report is easy to put on a shelf and it absolves too many people of having to make decisions. So I, we're not doing it.

[00:48:22] It got, you also made the point that it, you can't just do it at the end of the year and have it be that it's constantly changing, right? Correct. So, and also we, I've been tinkering with this new model. Um, there are the, the, I frame this in like an economic argument. So I promise this won't be super boring, but there was this guy named Joseph Joseph Schumpeter, who's so, oh yeah, very famous.

[00:48:46] Um, wrote this book called can capitalism survive that I, uh, I read for the, yeah, well I read it when I was in, um, when I was in college for the first time and I still have it and it's dog-eared and highlighted at any rate. The idea is capitalism is this perfect storm, this storm that's constant perpetual storm. It's constantly happening and it's sort of, uh, gobbles up, um, old existing technologies and, and creates new ones.

[00:49:16] And that's kind of what a storm does, right? It, it messes up the ocean, the shoreline or whatever, um, and, and makes way for new things to grow. Um, that's what's happening right now. It's called creative destruction and you have to be willing to see what's happening, which is the exact opposite of what our government is doing right now, uh, so that you can make way for what's coming. So, um, but does that mean that there are periods of time where people are miserable?

[00:49:47] No, I mean, look, you're, you're miserable. You know, who's going to be miserable. You know, the people, when there's big storms, Harper and I are from the Midwest. So like one of the things I learned how to do when you're a kid in school, you have a tornado drill. Every kid does where I grew up. Right. Um, so we understand whether if there's bad skies, you know, I'm not going to be the last person holding down the fort. I'm, I'm going to evacuate. There are always people who you, there's footage of them on the roof of their homes

[00:50:17] because they just wanted to wait things out. Yes. Um, the message is this time around with the technological storm that's happening. Um, you don't want to be that person on your roof because nobody is coming to rescue you. Nobody, I don't care who you are. So what do we do? You have to spot the storm before it happens. Do I dig a survival cellar and put a bunch of canned food in there? No, but you have to, you have to be willing to ask really

[00:50:45] to sort of think the unthinkable, which means if you're a company that's always made money doing X, or if you're a person who's always done Y, you may not be able to do that in the same way in the future. You just have to think about that. Now your market might shift, everything might shift. Um, and that's fine, but don't dig your heels in and refuse to make any changes. Is there something an individual should do?

[00:51:10] So we are calling what you're looking for are convergences. AI alone is interesting, but it is impacting other things. What you want to do is look at the convergence between AI and biology or AI and robotics or AI and ticker toys that you can buy on Amazon and then let China, I guess, surveil you. You're looking for these small intersections. Um, and then you have to be willing to adjust and adapt. So I, but most people are not willing to do that. They're just kind of

[00:51:38] hoping everything will be fine, you know, or they get really angry and then you wind up with the political crazy people that are out there. Yeah. I mean, uh, this is a Corey doctor wrote this last week that the president is kind of in a tough place because he's a populist and got elected by people who were worried about the future and said, help us. Uh, but he owes so much to the oligarchs, the people who are creating this unpleasant future for people, uh, that he, he, he hasn't,

[00:52:07] Corey says he's looking for an ox to gore. He has no ox to gore. He's got his base who is expecting are expecting him to help them. And he's got his donors and supporters who are expecting him to make them more money. I think Corey is brilliant. I think he is giving our current administration way too much credit for doing any kind of true deep thinking or soul searching. I don't think it's, well, it might be instinctual. I agree. It may not have been

[00:52:33] thought out, but it may be instinctive that, I mean, the populist thing resonated. It worked quite well. Got him. I know people don't love the politics when we get into it. I want to highlight, I am not, I'm politically independent. I have voted on for both, both sides, different parties at different times. This particular administration is acting in ways that are truly not unprecedented.

[00:52:59] Yeah. I'm not politically independent. You work for Obama's 2012 campaign. Based on my Wikipedia page. Yeah. It's very convenient actually to have that because then I go into these kinds of conversations, I'm like, guess what I believe? And everyone's like, oh, I can guess actually. It's very clear. I do think there is a thing that we need to remember is that populism has driven our elections for quite a while, not just starting with Trump. And not just in the US.

[00:53:26] Of course, not just in the US. I do think that there's a lot that is happening right now, but I wouldn't say that it seems like there is some grand plan. And I don't think that's just a Trump thing as well. I think the cohesive planning that you see from some other countries is where you get a lot of of benefit. There's also, you know, a little bit less freedom in some cases. And I think that

[00:53:55] can you have planning and freedom? Sure. I don't know. But I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't, I mean, yeah, maybe not. Amy, Amy thinks yes. Yes. We used to have something called the Office of Technology Assessment in this country, which got gutted. And those were like 700 academics whose job it was to help do long-term planning and make long-term decisions. So the answer is, of course we can, but you have to be willing to do it and to

[00:54:23] tell people no when the answer should be no, you know, but we've, we've, I don't know. I read, I don't know if I should say this out loud. I'm going to say it anyways. In ninth grade, I read the Communist Manifesto and was like, I'm a communist. We've got everything wrong in this country. You know what? Everybody's sensible at that age is. I did. I read that. I read Animal Farm. I went down, I became a vegetarian that year. I had very

[00:54:50] strong viewpoints. And then two years later, I read Ayn Rand and was like, yeah, that exactly. I am Howard Reardon. Yeah. I was like, I, I've read, I read, um, foundation and, uh, and the fountain had in the same year. And I was like, this, everybody should, the scientists should be in charge. And, uh, this, you know, forget communism. Um, anyways, I, I think there is no singular

[00:55:17] system that works because we're people and people have lots of different nuanced ideas, you know? Yeah. But I do think that capitalism has evolved in a way that's no longer healthy in the United States. Uh, Winston Churchill used to say, if you're not a liberal, when you're young, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative, when you're old, you have no brain. No brain or no money. Yeah. It's roughly the same. Yeah. Uh, so go ahead. I'm sorry, Harper. I didn't mean to cut you off.

[00:55:45] No, no, no. I was just thinking about the, the free market capitalism that we act like we have, yet we're banning BYD from coming into the United States, which, um, as someone that does startups, uh, competition is hard, but it's really, really, really hard. Oh, they're all protectionists. And I, I do think that we, we don't want that. We are, we are, we are soft right now and we need to be, we're in a country, in a, in a world that is not soft. And we've benefited.

[00:56:13] I should mention by the way that the office of technology assessment was not wiped out by the Trump administration. It goes away. No, it was Gingrich. Gingrich did it in his plan for America and it was under, uh, the Clinton administration that it happened. Yeah. And it was one of my favorite parts of the, the contract on America. The Dan Wong book was when, um, he was interviewing some people about the making masks and PPE around COVID. And he was talking to an American entrepreneur who said, that's just not our

[00:56:41] core business. And then he talked to a Chinese entrepreneur who said, oh, I thought our core business was making money. And I think that was a very good distinction of like these two systems and how they're colliding. Like I have that conversation constantly as a startup founder, people say, oh, why don't you do X, Y, or Z? And I'm like, oh, well, that's not our core business. And then I look at my friends who are not in the U S not in startup culture, not in venture-backed startup culture. And they are fighting to survive in a thunderdome of madness that I just don't,

[00:57:08] I would be scared to participate. Like I do not, I am, I am a raised in captivity, wild animal. These people are like, you know, like gazelles born to run. And it's just like a different kind of world. And I, I think it's, we're going to have some hard conversations with ourselves in the next five years. Here's the article from Semaphore, Rachel Jones writing, the class of 2026 is cooked. It is a tough time to be graduating from college right now. There's no, no question

[00:57:36] about it. Tech companies have slashed a hundred thousand jobs. Cloudflare just fired, fired 20% of its staff to be replaced by AI agents. Meta's firing 8,000 people. I don't know what happens when you, when you graduate from college these days. This is a graph of total non-farm hires

[00:58:01] from 2010 through 2026. And you can see that sticks precipitous decline. As soon as chat GPT comes out, I mean, the companies may be AI washing. They may just be using that as an excuse to fire, fire people, but I don't think there's any question. I mean, if I were graduating with a computer science degree right now, I don't know. I think there's a, there's a something I've observed, and I think this is kind

[00:58:26] of funny. Um, I think we forget about capitalism when we have these conversations because as the CEO of a company, if someone comes to me and says, I'm a mid-level employee, you have to pay me 250K a year, or someone comes to me and says, I'm a new grad, you have to pay me 120K a year. Um, and with Claude code or whatever their equivalent, why would I ever hire the middle career person? I think that the younger, I think the class of 2026 is not going to get jobs because there's just not, it's like a

[00:58:56] pretty hard job market in general, but I have more hope for the people who are just graduating, who are going to enter factory jobs of technology than I do, uh, of people who are getting laid off as a mid-career person. Um, now they can get a job. It's just not going to pay the same. And I think this is going to have a really, um, somewhat catastrophic impact on our knowledge worker communities, our dual income communities, you know, suburbs in general, because you're going to have a,

[00:59:22] you know, a group of people who've made 400K a year with two people or more, and suddenly they're not going to make that they're going to make half of that. And that's just going to cause, um, a lot of consternation, I think. And, or like, what does the tea party look like when it's not caused from NAFTA, et cetera, it's actually caused from, um, you know, Facebook laying off everyone. Um, you know, and I don't know, but I think about this a lot and it, and it, it scares me a little bit. Um, this is why they're populist movements.

[00:59:49] Well, I had a good, I had a good conversation with a friend who's a big AI doomer and I'm not an AI doomer in kind of the more classical sense. Um, I am, I, and I was asking him, I was like, well, if the AI, if AI kills us, how fast will it be? Like, are we talking, are we talking like, yeah, yeah. Are we talking like, is this like months of me strapped to a table or something? Or are we talking like, I wake up one day and I'm a paperclip in a router or something

[01:00:16] like that? You know, like, what are we talking? Am I going to turn into a mail server for some, like, you know, I'm going to wake up in a thousand years as the mail server. Like what exactly are you saying? We're all batteries, don't you know? Didn't you see the matrix? He was very, very confident that it would be very quick, like very fast. And I was like, okay, well I would much rather have AI doomer be the, be the end of us all than like human doomers. Um, because it seems to me that the human doomers is just pain and suffering for more people. Whereas AI doomer is like, I get turned into a paperclip and yeeted into the universe, which I'm,

[01:00:43] I'm here for. Um, so that's kind of my perspective. Okay. Got to go. Bye. What's the future. What tell us you're a futurist. Yeah, look, I'll tell us what's happening. Um, there are a lot, there's a lot of money to be made from doomerism. Yes. And so the future currently is the people, and we all know who they are, who are proclaiming end times, um,

[01:01:13] are going to make bank as in some way. I have to put out that same as it ever was. I used to work with John C. Dvorak. That was his shtick. That's right. Oh, that's right. After the keyboard. Yeah. No, he was a cousin to the keyboard, but he was a guy. I mean, he was a computer columnist, still is around, uh, who said the mouse is never going anywhere. He made a great living being

[01:01:37] that's all crap. That's right. You know, Ray Dalio, uh, very famous, um, money guy is out. He he's always been the, you know, there's a huge cycle coming. It's, it's going to be, they always say he was right in 2008. Sure. Sure. Everybody is right. Right. So it's like a clock

[01:02:02] twice a day, broken clock. Right. Here's, here's what I will tell you. Uh, I, my, we, for a living, you know, we have these models that we built and we use a lot of data and math and to some degree our experience and intuition, but it's really like data-based. I cannot build you a model that predicts the exact future and no way I can do that either because there's too many variables in play and there's too much change. Like you can't hook me up to Willow. It's still not

[01:02:29] going to happen. Right. Um, so, uh, I don't believe in the absolute apocalyptic, like super intelligence stories. Um, because at the moment I don't have data to support those that could change in a week, but that doesn't seem to be the path that we're on. The path that we're on right now seems to be much more like death by a thousand paper cuts, which is to say exactly to Harper's point, there's a whole bunch of middle level people who quite frankly, maybe they're,

[01:02:59] they're making very healthy salaries and maybe we had some salary inflation over the years, but those people are going to have a very, very hard time finding jobs that are going to pay the same amount of money, um, in a, in a different role or a different company. We have a lot of fresh people out of college who maybe were training for certain skills a little bit like between like 1999 and 2004,

[01:03:26] when everybody was had to learn flash, you know? Um, so like it's a little bit of that over again. So there'll be a little bit of uneasiness not to mention, look, there's all these new, very interesting fields in the process of being created, like commercialization of space, which has to do with manufacturing and a bunch of other things, um, that just haven't settled out yet. So we're in this moment of transition. I call everybody alive today, the transition generation.

[01:03:55] Um, we are transitioning to from where we were before to the time after, you know, people talk about, um, I had a computer growing up, but no internet. It's a pretty common story for people in my, whatever, some people in my age group. So I remember I had to build up a bunch of skills for the, for pre internet, like the Dewey decimal system and learning how to slowly read things.

[01:04:18] Um, but that, that set of skills truly supercharged me once I was a debate, you know, like I was a very competitive debater and all of that research was manual. So I had to do all of it by literally reading and ingesting, which meant that, yeah. So like that means I have phenomenal research skills. So when the internet came, I'm like a superhero when it comes to finding stuff better than everybody else.

[01:04:45] The Google foo. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm a cusper. My daughter is a cusper. So she is just the right age where she had to learn how to do everything manually before any kind of AI existed. Um, she is, and she's in ninth grade by the time that she's entering the workforce. And because she's been privileged that she has access to broadband and bamboo printer in our house and a bunch of other

[01:05:14] stuff, she's going to enter the workforce with an incredible set of skills that she had to build on her own. Plus all of the augmentation because of AI. So there are people out there who are sort of well positioned during this transition. And then there's a lot of people that aren't, and we don't have a plan for them and we should be making a plan for them, but we are not doing that. That has to happen at a federal level, I think. Yeah. Thanks. Let's take a break. Uh, more to come. Uh, we're talking the future

[01:05:44] with Amy Webb futurist. I have all your books on my shelf. I usually pull them down and hold them up. Uh, I mean, the signals are talking. Uh, the most recent one is, uh, the, uh, the one about a biotech. Um, what's the name of that? I forgot the Genesis project, the Genesis machine machine. That's right. Yeah. Really all about longevity and biohacking and stuff like that

[01:06:08] before that, the big nine, which was prophetic, uh, talking about AI. Um, are you working on any new books? I want to be, um, I, as you can tell, I've been thinking about end stage capitalism a lot lately and, uh, a solution around that, which I've, I've got, but Brian said, if I write another book, he's going to divorce me. So I, we have to, it's a balance. It's painful. It's a balance.

[01:06:34] I understand. I'm going to be writing a prolific sub stack. Um, there you go. Are you? Oh, that's fantastic. That's actually the more modern thing than writing a book. I've been on sub stack for a while and I've just been books. Yeah. So anyways, there we go. Yeah. And Harper Reed, who, uh, is, I love the, uh, just your spirit of adventure, uh, and, uh, discovery and he's doing it. And if you, if you're just joining us and you're looking at Harper on the video and you're seeing

[01:07:02] the pictures showing up over the, on the right there, over his left shoulder, that is a machine that when you walk into his offices at 2389.ai takes a picture of you and then makes this incredible line drawing and prints it out. We made a blog post about it. You can, you can read about it. It's so cool. It's very, very cool. Can I build one for my house? Well, it's, it's interestingly, it just uses an old mono price 3d printer that we just took,

[01:07:30] you know, it just, it just with a pencil on it. Um, we did hook up a, a brush to it to see if we could get brush strokes for more of a calligraphy style. I kind of like the line drawing thing, the line drawing. It's just looks really good. And then there's a whole bunch of software behind it. That's quite fun. Um, we spent a lot of time trying to make it cheaper, um, using local models and whatnot, and it's pretty fun. It's very, and it's also very funny. You call it Mikaso. Yeah, because it says Mikaso really loud when you hit the button. Mikaso is su-caso.

[01:08:00] Uh, wow. A 3d printer into an AI portrait artist. And I guess, uh, it's your colleague, Ivan Indrautama, who wrote this. Yeah. Yes. And Ivan and I've worked together since 2005. One of the things I think is the most important about careers is to have a crew of people that you love to work with. Yeah. And I've been very lucky to have that. And so I really am happy about that. I love the big button inspire and the other big button realize it's simple. It's a simple machine.

[01:08:30] Yeah. Ivan also built our little mics that are transcribing everything we say. And, um, he's kind of our hardware hacker. And this week we tried to nerd snipe him into doing the ESP32 Wi-Fi mapping stuff. So you could see, um, respiratory rate and heart rate of everyone that's inside of the office. Like astronauts. Well, I, I did this thing when I pitched a company in the over COVID where I had a heart rate monitor

[01:08:55] on my screen because I wanted the VCs that were pitching on video to understand that they had a physical, they, they would, the words would actually impact me physically. And they were trying to get the heart rate to go up. I presume. Of course. But what my team found is that if it was a good pitch, my heart rate was up high, you know, 120, 130, 140. If it was a bad pitch, I was at 60 flat. And like, they would just say, like, they would just be like, I don't like it, but it wasn't bad or good for the VC. It was bad

[01:09:25] or good. Like they were like Harper's out. And so the team just started to use it as a signal on whether they should, you know, participate or not. They'd be like, ah, Harper, Harper's heart rate dropped. He's done. He's pulled out of the conversation. You can tell his brain turned off. On the flip side, resting heart rate of 60 is pretty great. Yeah. No kidding. So you got that. I'm doing pretty good with that. I, uh, I'm a, I've been trying to get my cardio in shape. Turns out I'm getting old like Leo. Thank you. Sorry, Leo.

[01:09:53] Or you could do like Amy does and do gravel bike racing. I also right on the road. It's not just gravel. Okay. Yeah. I've been running with noise canceling headphones on. That's a good idea. That's a great idea. That won't possibly go wrong. I'm so happy to hear that. I just try and be in my own world without a care to the world, you know, just listening to, I don't know what I'd listen to. And then when you, when you hear this, you just go, what is that a truck coming up behind?

[01:10:20] But, but as, but running, I've been running, uh, roughly 10 miles a week, um, which I start from zero, but, um, running nobody on the road pays attention to anything, Amy. I think, I don't think it matters. I think you're right. You just have to yell bike. Like you just have to yell something. No one cares. No one pays attention. That doesn't matter. Um, and so frustrating. Amy, Amy, uh, enacted a real world version of the trolley problem. That's the problem. You know,

[01:10:45] we talk about AI is if you, if you gave an AI a, a trolley and there are 20 people tied to the track on one track. Uh, but if you take the other track, you're going to go off a cliff and kill everybody in the trolley. The AI has to decide, I guess there's only one, let's say there's one person on the trolley. Do you kill the one person who's riding on the trolley or do you kill the 10 people and save the one person on the trolley? Well, Amy decided to save the person who wasn't paying

[01:11:11] any attention and wiped yourself out. Never again. Next time. The people in the future, you asked me what the future is and the future that people lose and it's their fault. This episode of this week at tech is brought to you by scribe. A lot of organizations think scaling problems come down to hiring or budget, but more often it's that the way work actually gets done isn't documented and no one has the time to do it manually. That's when things start to break

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[01:13:24] How? Twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. Uh, actually speaking of Chinese models, uh, one thing people seem to agree is that Chinese models are better at video now than ours. Yeah. Very good. They're really good. That's what Ron's using. I suspect to make those propaganda videos, uh, which are also very good, which are also very good. Uh, by dance and, uh, Kwai shows models outperform

[01:13:53] Western rivals. This is from the financial times in realism and scale. So your contention that AI in China may be only a few months behind ours, open AI, open weight AI in China might only be a few months behind ours. Well, in some areas they're actually ahead of ours. Here, can you scroll down a little bit? Cause I, you can see right there something that was so in that video, you saw a little bit of

[01:14:18] head wobble, which is a tiny, do you see it? Yeah. It's an Indian gesture. Right. That is not known in the West. Right. Well, I, it is a very Indian, but, um, but these little tiny little nuances lend an authenticity. Yeah. Um, this is using sea dance and it is more than like 15 seconds long. Yeah. Sea dance is incredible. It's an, it's an incredible product. I think you mentioned that

[01:14:44] it mentioned that head wobble is really interesting. Uh, uh, Amy, because this, this gesture, you know, we have in the, in the, in the West, maybe nodding yes and shaking your head no, but this gesture is very meaningful. And there's multiple versions of that. There's not a single head wobble. There's different, right. And so the ability to do that in a AI is fascinating. Yeah. I don't know. I don't see any uncanny valley in this video, by the way, this, if you didn't know it was AI, you wouldn't,

[01:15:10] you wouldn't say, Oh, that's AI. It's a little choppy. So I would probably think it was, but to your point and that, that doesn't look very good. And the text was bad. It's not good at text still. I would be curious to know, did they, I have not seen how I obviously haven't seen the prompts, but what I'd be really curious to know is, did they say this is a family in this region in India or this type, you know what I mean? And then were those cultural cues added in automagically?

[01:15:37] Um, so yeah, there is, I mean, we're doing, we're getting there in the, in the West as well. Um, there's a really amazing, uh, YouTube channel we've been talking about on, um, intelligent machines called Chloe does history. If you guys see the, it is, um, so Chloe, which he was fully, um, AI generated, uh, is a kind of typical influencer, right? She's doing a lot of selfie videos in

[01:16:06] historic places. So here she is in ancient, in ancient London, but it's very credible. Okay. That is fish and smoke and something I genuinely cannot name. And I have made a mistake coming this way. So the plan is I'm going to check in at my room in the inn, get into the market, see how people actually, so the guy who does this is a, is a historian. He's interested in actually recreating history. So he uses, uh, authentic photo, not photos, drawings of the period. And he has many

[01:16:34] different periods. Uh, and then somehow, I don't know how he's doing the influencer. This was London in 1536, but somehow he's doing the influencer as well. It's Chloe VS history is the, uh, channel now he isn't really forthcoming. He has a, I bought it a $69 E pub on how he does it, but he's not fully forthcoming in how he does it, but he is using, um, Western, uh, video models, but yeah, one of the

[01:17:03] giveaways is it's very chop is that choppy. Is it, is the history good? Is it like credible? He says it is. Um, okay. Oh good. Yeah. Well, okay. So this, this one is, this one is her in, um, on the Titanic, right? I heard this morning that captain Smith is attending a dinner party tonight in a private first-class restaurant. This is my best chance. She's going to try to warn the captain

[01:17:29] that the Titanic is going to hit an iceberg. And so she finds him captain Smith. I have very credible information that there is a significant iceberg risk tonight. And he just brushes her off completely. I think some of the history in this is a little bit influenced by the movie Titanic. Um, but I've read a lot, I read, I read a lot about the Titanic. And as far as I can tell, it's actually

[01:17:54] fairly accurate. It's accurate enough. Here's the thing. I think this is impressive from the point of view of if you had a ninth grader, I'm, uh, who wasn't that interest in history, but maybe would be galvanized by this notion of an influence, something identifiable and influencer stuck in these historic periods. It might be a hook that you could get people interested. I think that's the creator's, uh, intention. Um, so it's, I think it's very interesting, by the way, uh, 1.9 million views

[01:18:24] of this Titanic video. It's a one month old. So he's definitely getting traction on this. Certainly better than me showing Petra drunk history, which I thought was age appropriate a couple of years ago. And I forgot was not, maybe not, maybe not. Um, it was not. Yeah. But this is kind of of that same ilk, which is something like, here's a way to make history more identifiable. Here she is in, in ancient Rome. And what he's done is taken, uh, drawings

[01:18:51] and pictures of ancient Rome and, and, and brought and animated those and put Chloe in the scene. Every once in a while, there's some anachronisms. There were some guys in sunglasses walking around. I thought that was probably not accurate. Um, but I mean, for instance, one of the things people don't know about ancient Rome when they go visit the ruins is that all this stuff was very colorfully painted. And so he's recreated the colorfulness of ancient Rome. I mean, this was the promise of VR,

[01:19:20] right? We were supposed to be able to travel back in time and, you know, and I think it's just a short step from this to maybe making it a 3d VR. Yeah. But isn't this kind of what, what Amy was talking about where you have these transitionary folks, us, and we're starting to see glimpses of what the future will look like for the people who come after typically our kids, et cetera. And, and this idea of like, I remember when I was younger, like third and fourth grade,

[01:19:49] I was obsessed with unsolved mysteries. And so I would read about Amelia Earhart or, or pyramids or whatever. And these books that were obviously targeted towards my age at that time. And I would have this very imaginative interface with these books, um, for better or for worse. Now I can participate in some way, you know, or someone could make a, a, a product where someone could participate

[01:20:17] in that, um, whether it's on YouTube or what have you. Um, I hate that. I just said all those words together, you know, product, et cetera. Like I combined a bunch of words that I love. Let's take something for children and make it into a product that we can capitalize on this. How can we monetize this? But, but I do think that that, that is a good example. And we have all of these glimpses, right? Like a personal robot, like the, what was it? I don't remember the war starts with

[01:20:43] an F they were all over the news this last week, the robot company. And they talked a lot about their robot or, um, there are all these glimpses waymos, or there's these glimpses of what the future will be. It just hasn't been woven together yet in the same way that those of us who are building on the internet in 1999, 2000, 2002, um, no, no, no, he's talking about the, um, is it not format factor? It's not factor. It's a, was it factor chat room? What's he talking about?

[01:21:13] He's talking about, I have, I have outsourced my brain to a bunch of humans in a chat room. So that's, that's working pretty well. This is the company. It's also working on skin that they're trying to make lifelike human. I cannot, it sounds kind of creepy. Yeah, it is creepy. Yeah. I mean, the Neo is creepy. Here's an older fella with his little, a Neo home robot. It's only $20,000. You can put a deposit down right now on this. Look,

[01:21:42] can you imagine having this thing, bringing the groceries in? Figure AI. Figure. So creepy. What is it again? Figure. F-I-G-U-R-E. Um, it made headlines because, uh, one of their robots worked for eight hours in a factory now. Oh, so yeah, I, we showed that and that was a, such a bogus, uh, video. The thing everybody forgets is there are still humans involved in a lot of this on the back end watching and manually helping. So. Yeah. But the point is, is that it's a glimpse,

[01:22:12] right? Because we see the tele-operated one that is doing it. There was something I read about the difference between Waymo and, um, the Tesla, uh, the, the cabs, like the Tesla cabs are, are human driven. And so when they get into a problem, the humans get them out of the problem. Right. Whereas the Waymo's are algorithm driven. When they get in a problem, the human helps guide them out of the problem, but they use their, their AIs to get themselves out of the problem, which means that it's learning. It's helping, you know, it's, it's continuing. And I think,

[01:22:40] but, but the, but the, the bigger point here is that this is just a glimpse of the future and we are probably not going to see it woven together in the way that we can imagine Star Trek or some Blade Runner or whatever movie we like. And we always predict it wrong. We thought we'd have flying cars. We always get it wrong because we are embedded in the past and we see everything through the, that, uh, window. And so we thought the internet was going to be a magazine

[01:23:06] stand, right? Well, it was for, it was because that's who was making those websites was people. That's who they thought it was. This is why the field of strategic foresight, which is where I happen to operate is so important because you want to pick up signals along the way as you know, like, this is what Harper's saying, right? Like this isn't the future gives us a glimpse of a change that's going to happen, but how does that fully render? We don't know yet. Are you optimists?

[01:23:33] I don't, I wouldn't, I'm not a anything. I'm, I don't, I'm a, I'm a, whatever. You resist this kind of characterization. I do because also, because don't forget in my field at some point, uh, most of, most of the people become eugenicists and, um, they always do. Why is that? They always do. Because at some point you, because if you are good at this job, um, two things happen.

[01:23:58] One, you amass more credibility and power and riches over time as anybody does. And two, uh, uh, you start to believe that your ideas are correct. It becomes a self-fulfilling thing. And that eventually leads to the, the, the, the, no, it's not about, it's not about killing. It's about pearls. No, but this is where eugenics about like changing our genetic structure to get rid

[01:24:24] of the sub humans. And, uh, it's about, yeah. I mean, why do you think all these dudes are spreading their seed around, you know, because they believe, yeah. Yeah. Or like, um, Larry, uh, Oracle, Larry, um, Ellison, thank you as an Island where, you know, he's working on longevity and, you know, that's, that's what inevitably page of Google even said the quiet part out loud when he said, we really want an Island where there's no government regulation so we can do our thing. He said this

[01:24:54] years ago. Is that, is that a continent of becoming filthy rich? Sealand. Sealand. There was an example. We're going to take all these disused. Yes. We're going to take all these disused oil platforms and we're going to make them into little countries where no one's going to mess with us. Yeah. Brian, Brian is a, a baron there. Oh, he bought into this. Is he living there now? That was a, no, no, no. I, I bought him. You made him a baron. Yeah, I did. Does he also have a crater

[01:25:23] on the moon named after him? Yeah. That was ridiculous. Here's the robot you were talking about sorting packages, but this is such a bogus demo because notice the packages are very uniform and somebody in our discord pointed out, you know, all you need is a camera or a series of cameras on all sides. And then you could just flip the thing till it's, all it's doing is putting the barcode face

[01:25:47] down. I agree, but, but, um, its hands are articulated in a way. Some of what's happening there is more advanced. Yeah. Um, and I really seen this in the past where it would lose packages over the edge and stuff. It's much better than it was. Yeah. We need to unhook from the idea of robots as humans. First, it anthropomorphizes them in a way that's not healthy. And secondly, the vast majority of what's being created is not that it is all different form factors and types of

[01:26:14] little machines that should be their purpose. But to your question earlier, this is how you miss the future. You get stuck with this image in your head that the future is walking, talking robots. And then this other thing seems to come out from nowhere. Cause you just weren't paying attention to all those signals. This is the dystopian future of, uh, of the Neo robot where the humans are just sitting there playing with cards while the robot is wandering through your house,

[01:26:43] spinning the globe, giving you flowers. This is so the dystopian future is the fact that they're playing war. Like that's the worst card game ever played literally any other game. Like if that bothers me more than the robot, it's also plays like the beginning of a horror movie. It is such a horror movie. It does. It 100% does. Come into the house, human. Would you like another beer? Oh, shaggy one. It's just not, this is not,

[01:27:11] I don't want this. And look at this little step, step thing. I don't want this. I don't mind getting up and getting a beer. You'll have it. It just won't be this. Like you're going to get something along these lines. Like I, I like if you like, obviously there's been a bunch of China talk this week, but one of the things that was really fun, are you an optimist? Are you an optimist Harper? Uh, I am approximately an optimist. Okay. But, and I think I've said this before,

[01:27:40] like, it seems like we're at the cusp of going the route of some amazing post magical world where it's Star Trek and all sorts of stuff, or we're, we're in the Mad Max world. Um, and I'm kind of pro on both sides. Like Mad Max had better fashion and cooler cars, but Star Trek was pretty good. But as my Trekkie friend Clint would always say, you know, Star Trek had to, they had to destroy the world

[01:28:07] before they invented the society of Star Trek. Um, and so I think that there's a lot there, but I, what do you, I want to talk more about what Amy just brought into frame here. So I have been on the hunt for an Omnibot for literally 30 years. Do you remember this? This is an old fashioned robot. This was the, this was a Tomy robot. This, this, so this thing, it had a tape recorder. You could, it was a little security system. It had a tray. It would bring

[01:28:35] drinks. So it was a much nicer version than the robot that you just sold. Anyhow, um, it mostly works. I have to tinker a little bit more with, um, some of the electronics. Are you going to have this wander around the house? What does your daughter think of this? It has a cassette player, right? It has a cassette player. It does have a cassette player. And it's a remote control, right? It's remote control. It does. The battery, the problem is the battery is very specialized just to this. And I've, I've been everywhere trying to find one that actually works.

[01:29:01] That's what happened to my segways. I had my segways. You had many segways? I had two. I had two, one for each of us, but the battery died and it turned out the battery for the old school segway, the really good one is $7,000. Wow. So I had to buy the, the replacement and they're crappy. They were cheaper. They have that. That's too many dollars. Do you guys really not remember the Omnibot? That was like, that was- Oh, I remember the Omnibot.

[01:29:31] The Tony Omnibot. Wow. That's what that was. That was the Omnibot that was soup. It was, uh, did all of this stuff. You could program it. Yeah. This is the, what I wanted when I was a kid. I desperately wanted one of these. And of course we, my parents couldn't afford it. Um, Here's one, uh, It's hard. They, they are very rare. Same problem though. Battery will not charge. Same problem. Yeah. So, um, it looks like Robbie, the robot from, uh, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

[01:30:00] The commercials were cool. Like this was, I saw this and was like, it blew my mind. I was like eight or whatever. Um, I think we're all of the same generation here. Cause like, yeah, I remember seeing this and being like, Oh my God. I don't remember this. I'm too old. I don't remember this. Tinkering and tinkering and tinkering with it. It's clean. It looks good. I just have to get the battery. It was probably the parent that said, we're not buying this. Yeah. No way. Would you like to know what my parents did? My parents,

[01:30:27] it was the last night of Hanukkah and, uh, there was a small box that was very lightweight and there was a big box that was extremely heavy. And my sister, who's like the world's greatest gift receiver ever. Cause no matter what it is, it's the greatest thing she's ever received. And you, you, it's a joy to give her gifts. She rips open the paper. There was a pound puppy on the inside. And she was just like, like her head exploded. It was the greatest thing that had

[01:30:53] ever happened. She got a pound puppy. Wow. I have been telling everybody at school for a week. I got the Omnibot cause what else could be in this, this heavy box. Right. And I've been asking for it forever. I rip open the paper. Sure. That I know exactly what's on the inside. And it was a pound puppy with like 30 cans of Campbell's soup out of our pantry. I love this to make it heavy. And, uh, my parents thought it was funny. And also that we need to

[01:31:20] have equitable, like the gifts had to be the same. And I'm like, what about me signaled? I want a pound puppy. Like, why would you do this? So anyways, we'll continue reliving Amy's childhood traumas in just a little bit. Pound puppy and 30 cans of soup. But if anybody is listening out there and has access to a battery that might work, um, please contact me. I will happily take it off your hands.

[01:31:47] Yeah. You came to the right place. Probably there is somebody listening with a Tomy Omnibot battery that is still functioning. There must be a way, maybe you could get your guy, Harper, to wire up an ESP 32 to make this work. Well, I mean, you got to still have the power. I wonder, I'm just, I mean, yeah, there's gotta be a way, right? Can't you just, you're going to have, I think, Jerry rig a battery at this point, because any battery from that era

[01:32:14] is probably dead. It's going to be, it's going to be dead by now. Yeah, we have, those are not CADs. Um, correct. Uh, I'm also, there are ways to do it, but I don't want to mess up the form factor because it'll look like it's all, you don't want to let acid car battery hanging off its ass. That's no good. Yeah, I understand. Uh, wow. We have learned so much about both of you today and I'm, Oh, just wait. We have a little bit more time. We're not done. We're just starting now.

[01:32:42] We're just starting. No, I wouldn't dream of it. What kind of soup was it? Campbell's tomato. Yeah, no, it was, uh, my mom made very few things. Many of them included for whatever reason, either cream of chicken soup or cream of mushroom soup as a core ingredient in the seventies. You could make anything if you put a mushroom soup in it. It was the duct tape of cooking. It was the duct tape of cooking. You're exactly right. You're exactly right. We'll have more in

[01:33:11] just a little bit with Amy and Harper. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. I have a little soft spot in my heart for Shopify. If you've ever thought of starting your own business, you know, the idea is the easy part. You get the great idea, but then it's those pesky little implementation details that get in the way. Like how do you charge people? Who's going to design the website? How do you handle fulfillment? And I have, you know, a pretty good idea of what it's like. Cause I've

[01:33:41] watched both my kids actually start their own businesses, but you know what? They got it done with Shopify. Um, uh, salt, Hank's a really good example. My son started making his, uh, TikTok videos, uh, as a TikTok chef, you know, making these sandwich videos. Uh, it was going really well. He had this, you know, brand. It was, it was called salt, Hank. His name is Henry. And, uh, he thought, you know, I should be selling salt because salt, Hank. And I've got, you know, he pretty,

[01:34:10] he got to like two and a half million TikTok followers. So, but how do you do that? Shopify was the secret. Uh, Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. I mean, big names like Heinz and Mattel to brands, you know, just getting bootstrapped, like salt, Hank salt lovers club. It's got that purple Shopify button on there. He, he, if you're

[01:34:36] worried about a website, Shopify helped Hank build a perfect online store that matched his brand's unique style. They can do that for you too. They also help with the marketing Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns, wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And of course, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything. And of course, there's something about that iconic purple shop pay button is used by millions of businesses like

[01:35:05] Hank's around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. And it also, it works because customers know it and love it and they go, okay, I get it. This is a real deal. This is a real deal. It's easy for me to buy here. It helped him turn salt, Hank's salt lovers club into a pretty big deal. It's time to turn your what-ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your

[01:35:29] $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash twit. Go to shopify.com slash twit. That's shopify.com slash twit. I love that sound. Um, yeah, he's, uh, he, uh, actually poor Hank made a video on Instagram. Um, Mark Zuckerberg was in New York city, uh, for the Met Gala. He actually

[01:35:56] went to the Met Gala, which I don't know. You don't normally think of a guy in t-shirts with a chain being, it was the tech gala this year. It wasn't, it really was. I think this goes to the taste thing. Everyone wants to be cool right now. And there are people who never, they just aren't very cool. I don't know how to say it. Like, you see, you said that perfectly. You see the loathing choices,

[01:36:23] which I think everyone should make their own choices. But I talked to a recently, I talked to a tech entrepreneur and I, he was dressed in all black with a leather jacket. And I was like, why are you dressed this way? Because I thought it was interesting. Cause I was hoping he was going to like participate in fashion, which was my goal. And he was just like, I didn't think about what I put on this morning. I'm like, that is a lie. You literally are dressed in all black. Every single item is black and you have a leather jacket on and it's not cold out, but it's not hot out. You

[01:36:49] know, like, I mean, you're wearing a vibe. This is, yeah, this is a statement you have chosen. There's a thing there, which I think a lot of these tech people have achieved everything in life, but they have not achieved cool and they've not achieved art and they've not achieved something that people look at as a, as taste yet. They're telling everyone, no taste is the only thing left. And then they have to be a little self-reflective and be like, oh no taste. How do I get that? And so then

[01:37:15] they have to, they have to pay money for it. But as we all know, the best taste isn't money related. Like it's like it, the money can get you in a door. Money can do a lot of things, but if you look at the coolest people, it's always these people who don't necessarily have money as a resource, you know, throughout history, which is, which is why the Met Gala is always a cluster anyway. But I find it kind of funny because I think they are in inside of them. I think they're all dying.

[01:37:43] They're being hollowed out as they are just like, where's my AP swatch or whatever. They're trying to, you know, they're trying to do it. You're saying money can't buy you love and it can't buy you taste. I think it can buy you somebody who has taste. It can buy you a lot of things and there obviously are stylists. That's a big career for a lot of people. Like I think just because you're an actor doesn't mean you dress cool, but there's a real trust component. When you look at people who

[01:38:09] have very good stylists, like Jeff Goldblum, for instance, has an incredible stylist. I forgot their name and Jeff, Jeff Goldblum looks incredible everywhere he goes in every context. And it's because of his trust relationship with their stylist. But every time I talk to any of my oligarchy friends, what they do not have is a level of trust relationship with anyone in their lives at that level because they think they are at the top. And so to have a collaborative taste-based or

[01:38:36] art-based relationship with someone, you have to trust them and love them. You have to believe that you are equal to them or they are even better than you. And most of my friends who've achieved this just don't have that belief. They think they are at the tippy top. And I don't, I mean, I don't think you can, I don't think they'll get it. Well, Mark Zuckerberg decided not to do anything fancy. He's basically in a very pedestrian black tie. His cummerbund is not well-adjusted. Priscilla looks

[01:39:02] great. It's Priscilla Chan. His wife looks beautiful in a red dress. But before he went to the Met Gala, he decided he wanted a Assault Hank French dip sandwich delivered to his door. So my son made him one and delivered it in person to Zuck. Is this real? Yeah. What? It's not AI. It's not AI?

[01:39:25] No. The funny, the ironic thing, he's actually asking Zuck to spill the sandwich onto his... By the way, Zuck has a grand piano in his hotel suite. Yeah, exactly. It's like a fashion statement a little bit. But the funny thing is, I don't think Hank really appreciated how Mark Zuckerberg is loathed because look at all the comments. Eat the rich. Don't feed the rich. This is incredibly

[01:39:52] disappointing. The Epstein class is really trying to sanitize their image with the common people. Billionaires trying to be cool and in touch is gross. Come on, man. You're better than this. Of course, what these commentators didn't realize is they are commenting about this. Hank at least got Mark Zuckerberg to buy a sandwich from him. They're giving Mark Zuckerberg money by commenting on this on Instagram, right? They're using Mark Zuckerberg's platform. Anyway. When was that?

[01:40:22] The Met Gala. What is it? A couple of weeks. Oh, it was? Yeah. Wow. Oh, Hank's doing really well. This is the number one sandwich in New York City. I need to have it. I'd like to eat it. We're moving offices. We'll just get it for the new office. Are you moving to New York? Are you moving to New York City? We've always had an office in New York. We just rented out. We took a

[01:40:46] longer term lease on a floor of a building with a kitchen. He's in the West Village. Joan's at Bleaker. All right. Got to get there early because he sells out almost every... There's a long line and he sells out every... That's awesome. Yeah. He only makes one thing. He makes a French dip sandwich. Wait a minute. Sorry. The dots just connected. That's your kid? Yeah.

[01:41:11] I know exactly what this is. Sorry. I don't... Oh my God. Yes. That is a big, big deal. Well, you know what? This is great because I love it. He never played upon his name at all. This is not... He just... Yeah. No. I just... Wow. Yeah. Salt Hank is Henry Laporte. Oh my God. All right. I just want that mustache. I know. He's got the Mario mustache, which is... Now I told him you blew it because you can never shave.

[01:41:39] That's your... That's incredibly cool, you know? Yeah. That's a hot, hot, hot commodity. It's very hot right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, he's... His next thing he's putting... He's buying a restaurant in the city to open a fine dining restaurant that he's going to call Laporte's. Huh. Oh. And I said, there damn well better be a family table. That's all I can say. Yeah. Are you going to get a table? You got to get one.

[01:42:05] Hey, how did your show do, by the way? Amy, maybe people don't know this. We mentioned it last time you were on, produced... Was one of the producers of a Broadway hit... Oh, yeah. ...called Chess, the revival of Chess, with a new book that was more timely. Yeah. Is it still running or is it over? It very much is. So... Wow. That's great. It's still on Broadway. It wasn't supposed to run this long, was it?

[01:42:31] No. No. It has historically failed every single time somebody has tried to revive it. People might know the song One Night in Bangkok by Murray Head, which was a hit. It's nominated for six Tonys, I think. Congratulations! And if you are not a Broadway person, this is a good show for you because this is not like a Broadway show, Broadway show. This is a show about geopolitics, like the USSR versus the US.

[01:43:00] And the music is... The band is on stage and it's more rock music. It was written by the two Bs of ABBA. Benny and Beyond. Yep. So I'm actually executive producing a new show about the far future of AI, which is what I thought you were talking about. But... Oh, tell me about that. You have become... Are you now an impresario?

[01:43:23] No. I just... I'm an investor. My role in chess was that I gave them a lot of money to make the show happen. And of course, Leah is one of the stars. Of course, she's famous from Glee. That guy. So Nicholas Christopher, who just... He's a singular talent. It's great. It's great. Anybody who's coming to New York or in New York... You know what? I'm going to go to New York because I've never had one of Hank's sandwiches and I have... I've got to go and have it. You've never had one of his sandwiches?

[01:43:52] No wonder there's not a family table. I will call you. I will get tickets because I would like to see this very much. I will get you tickets. I'll get you house seats. Just let me know. That would be wonderful. Yeah. Give me some dates. I will give you some dates. Maybe if you can spare them... Yeah, yeah. I won't bring Jeff Jarvis because he hates musicals, but maybe Paris LeCoe. And I won't bring Hank because he hates musicals, but maybe I'll find something to go with. No, this would be a good one to see. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:44:20] Leah Michelle, who is incredible and what a great personality and singer. Aaron Tvitt from... Yep. And Nicholas Christopher, who was in Hamilton and he was in Sweeney Todd. He is, again, like you don't have to be a person that likes opera or Broadway music to enjoy this. It really is. It's amazing. It really is. Well, there's Amy's plug. Harper... I don't have any plays. I just have it to happen.

[01:44:49] I have to say, I have been using skills from 2389.ai. There's some very good skills in your marketplace. We have a couple secret ones that are... One of them is called Jam, which gets a whole group of people to work with you. We have one that's called Review Squad, which is really fun because you can enable a well-actually squad of agents to review your code. I love that. And it's all Hacker News commenters.

[01:45:19] Oh, my God. How funny. So they'll create these really burning things. But one of the things that we've been doing with Review Squad is really fun because you'll just say, hey, let's light up a review squad of people to review this code. And they will go through and do all of this like, oh, we're going to have someone that has this expertise. So this I'll always add a cat. I'll be like, also add a cat. And then I'll... I don't know if it's on there. It might be. And then I'll say, also add Anna Karenina. And it always adds...

[01:45:47] I've used your Fresh Eyes review, but that's not Review Squad. This is like super Fresh Eyes review. It's very good. Let me see if I can find the URL. You could have Anna Karenina. What does Anna Karenina do when she reviews your... I don't even know what her personality is. Cutting, very cutting and very philosophical reviews that make you a little bit sad. I think you should have Schumpeter in there as well. I don't even know what you just said. Schumpeter, you know, the guy Amy was talking about. The capitalism guy. Oh, that guy. I mean, you can do whatever you want. That guy.

[01:46:17] This is how it works. I have Dinesh and Guilfoyle fighting over my code from Silicon Valley. That really worked well. It's a little bit like that. And it's very funny. And I think this is the thing that I keep coming back to is how... I think one of the things that we're going to think about a lot when it comes to AI in the future is how do we make it so people trust it? How do we make it so people love it, weirdly?

[01:46:45] How do we make it so people believe it, et cetera? And I think a lot of these are going to be... We're going to try anthropomorphizing. We're going to see how it goes. It's going to stick in some cases. It's not going to stick in some cases. But we have found that anthropomorphizing these things has been very, very helpful. And so being able to say... You're not against it. You think it's okay. Well, I mean, I think it can. I have a few friends who are deep in AI psychosis. Do you think they're conscious? Yeah. I mean, do you think... No. I'm not a monster.

[01:47:16] No, I mean... Richard Dawkins thinks Claudia is conscious. Well, we talk about this and we call them they. Like we refer to them as beings. We don't necessarily... I would not say it's conscious. But I do have a thing here which I think is very complex, which is I was once in a short argument with a friend about whether they can be funny, like whether they can make jokes. Oh, they can be very funny now.

[01:47:44] Well, that's the thing is I laugh at them and my friend was laughing at them. Well, that's what started the conversation is it made a joke. And the fact that it made a joke, you know, I think there's some complicated questions about intent when it comes to humor. And but if so, I don't know. I'm not really too worried about it. I don't need these things to be alive or dead for me to have fun using them to do my job in this fun way.

[01:48:09] I tell people when we're in my office, which I find be really fun to be in, I'm always like, look, it's hard outside. We have all sorts of crazy happening outside. Inside, it's really fun. We have robots that yell at us. They're listening to everything we say and making fun of us. And then they're helping us. Aren't we? In a weird way. I mean, this is. I don't even think we're at the tip. I think there are people out there that are just really token maxing, so to speak.

[01:48:34] I was telling you before the show that I log my food and exercise with my agent using chat GPT. And it's it's I think this is making a joke. I said this morning, log 25 minutes of Tai Chi. And it said graceful and annoyingly virtuous, which is a joke, right? Yeah. Yeah. I logged. I logged 5000 meters rowing. It says another neatly documented suffering session. Why chat GPT versus. Claude.

[01:49:03] I was a Claude guy. Yeah. You know, I just try them all. But. And you don't find the constant fragility of open AIs models to be so infuriating that you. I don't think anything's your computer screen. No. I. I've never experienced that. Oh, I have there. There. With each iteration, it sometimes is prioritizing speed over. Well, yeah, but. But a tropic was doing that in spades last. Yeah, I don't know this. I don't know. This is different.

[01:49:31] This is different than the fail whale era of Twitter, where it's much different. It's had like too many people like bogging down the servers or once. So there was a temporary outage. This is not that. This is like you're building stuff and you're trying to deploy stuff. And there's fragility because with each new model improvement, something is getting degraded. Yeah. Right. And like, but you don't know when that's going to happen. It's not like. Or how. Right. It's going to happen in weird ways. Right. But. It's like working with a temperamental intern.

[01:50:02] Yes. I mean, I do think that when we say intern, we're under where it can do a lot more than an intern, I've found. So I feel like we say intern, but we actually mean like full-fledged employee a lot of times. I sometimes say idiot savant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. So I've come to this conclusion and I've talked about this a lot, which is I really think that

[01:50:28] we're at a place where tokens are oil and all of these companies are trying to get us to use their engine because they're realizing that if tokens go to oil, kind of like an airline or any of these other things that have just kind of been so commoditized that nobody has loyalty. They have to manufacture processes to get loyalty. So the question Amy just asked is the right question. Oh, why ChatGPT versus Cloud? And you were just like, oh, I use them both. I bounce back and forth, which is how I do it as well. And sometimes like, it's like, oh, the app works better on my phone. I'm at a park. I'm going to use that one.

[01:50:57] That app works better on my phone. And I have no loyalty to the direct products. You want it to be commoditized. And in fact, you are more and more fungible. I don't have loyalty to any system. This is not a Mac versus PC situation. However, I don't like burning time, which is what's happening. You know, I get something trained. See, I get nothing but time. Well, and I... I'm not doing this for a living.

[01:51:22] I mean, I've built a ton of different skills and tools that I use all the time. It's not for funsies. So I don't like showing up to work. And like, one of them is named Kevin, right? I don't like it when Kevin and I both show up to work and like Kevin is not doing his job correctly. You know? Right, right, right. But isn't it like a normal employee? I mean, doesn't that happen with humans? Yeah, but I could... But yes. But you know what? If that normal employee did it enough times, then that employee would be on a PIP.

[01:51:52] And like, I mean, there's... You know, I... And you just... You don't bring on people that you know you're going to have to sink a lot of costs into. So I don't like the unpredictability. I don't get like... Nobody's like giving me a phone call and letting me know that there's going to be a new model release or an upgrade. You know, Tuesday. What we have been building into our systems right now, and this is pretty new, and this is outside of the traditional harnesses. So this is not inside a Chachapiti or a Claude. This is in our own kind of harnesses. Is... And we like to...

[01:52:20] We like to kind of phrase it as you're leaning into the diversity of each model. And so what I have found is that there's a few people in my life who are doing evals that can... I can say, hey, what is the best model for coding today? What is the best model for reviews today? What is the best model for building specs or documentation today? And the today there is very important because it really does change that often.

[01:52:44] And what we found is like right now, Codex 5.5 or Chachapiti 5.5, OpenAI's Chachapiti model 5.5 is very, very good for coding. And so... But we also use Opus 4.7 for reviewing. And so the thing is, is this kind of using the diversity of models means that you can do things that are really interesting.

[01:53:06] Like you can have a very inexpensive model, something that's free or locally run that writes the code in this very granular way because you had a very expensive model through the planning expecting the free model to do it. And so instead of spending a $600 or $1,000 for an entire project of raw API costs, you're spending maybe $50 on the planning and then a slower but much freer version of the doing. And so we really, really rely on this, which has actually made me have a much more...

[01:53:35] I don't know, more... I don't worry so much about which one I'm using. Like I don't... We don't really have the experience of, oh, Kevin's the bed today and I have to wait. You know, we have to switch the model, which means we have to change all the prompts. It's more that like Kevin is an average of all of them mixed together with reviewers of different models, etc. Now it's much slower. It's a pain in the ass. And it's a lot of evals. I think I spend more time in my life right now doing evaluations than I do anything else of just seeing what is working over and over again.

[01:54:05] But it is very interesting. And I do think that these model companies are struggling to find relevancy. Like they're just trying to build products that are going to be outside of tokens. Right. And this is some of... Again, so we started all of this by talking about the open models. You know, when you have these closed ecosystems, you get a little bit more of this friction from my point of view. The stuff that I'm talking about is like very narrowly defined singular tasks that I can just offload and it makes my life easier. So I'm not going through evals or having...

[01:54:33] It's just stuff that I built to do stuff easier, faster. We have a fairly powerful internal tool that my team built to automate some of the signals and the trends and the modeling. And like we can find stuff literally before everybody else does with a wide margin. And start to automate the things that come after that. For that, we have a totally modular system that is a mix of multiple different systems.

[01:54:58] You know, but it's an interesting point Harper made because I think a lot of... Nobody... A lot of leaders who have these expectations that a team is going to go fast on AI because everything is automated don't understand the piece that Harper just explained. It's not... I mean, yeah, it's technically faster than humans typing things.

[01:55:22] But for any of these systems to be good enough to deploy without breaking down all the time, you need all of those additional steps. And that does take time. You can't... You know, it just does. And I think people don't realize that. Then they have these outsides, you know, these crazy expectations for like... It's also been my goal not to be dependent on any one front... Certainly frontier model. Smart. Yeah.

[01:55:46] I want to develop skills that are generic enough so that tomorrow I can use chat GBT and the day after I can use GLM and the day after that I can use Kimmy or all of the above. I really think more and more people are doing what you're both doing, which is having... Do you think so? I don't know. You don't think so? I mean, I think... Like a company saying we're going to use Anthropic. That's it. Yes. Most of... Yes. Because of compliance.

[01:56:16] Like all of the things... That's a good point. They can't easily... It's not as fungible for them. Or they're using... No, they tend to hitch their wagon to a company or like Palantir, which then... Palantir switches, doesn't it? But you're always using Palantir. Correct. So this is... The better route, because all of this is so new, is to be as versatile as you possibly can. Right.

[01:56:43] But there's a legal and compliance issue that makes that super, super, super hard. Yeah. Yeah. I think individuals... Yep. It's also contrary to like how corporate... What is it called? There's a word that starts with a P. Like the buying infrastructure of a corporate, giant corporate is not like, let's just buy all of them and sign you up for it. They want a big pre-revenue defined spend where they can save money, get 20% off or whatever. And that just doesn't work when everything is...

[01:57:10] You're like, oh, we have to switch every two weeks to figure out what the best one is. And I think that we're just not yet at the end. This is a little bit like data centers back in early 2000s, where you would just be like, oh, well, we're in Exodus. And someone's like, ooh, that's interesting. We just moved from Exodus to... So whatever. Like the data center itself was a... Each of them were equivalent. And you just had little bits here and there. The difference is you're just changing an API right now. So it really is you can change it. But I really...

[01:57:40] And yeah. And it's... Everyone wants to solve this problem in a way that captures more capital, not in a way that makes it easier to move around. So it'll be really interesting to see how this manifests, like what will happen. The way you guys are talking, Amy, it sounds like you don't really think this is a bubble. Oh, Leo. Don't go crazy. So no, the amount of money... The bubble thing is tough.

[01:58:08] I don't want to equate what's happening right now to the dot-com era, because they really are very, very different. That being said, I get worried anytime this amount of capital flows. And into something that is... So that everybody has such high hopes for. It's not sustainable. Well, we're also like in the building phase. We're not in the coming up with products that will shift things phase. Right.

[01:58:37] Companies aren't doing that yet. We're not in a revenue phase or profit phase. So a lot of infrastructure has to get stood up. And that's unrecoverable investment that you're not going to make back. What do you think of Jeff Bezos' contention? That this is not a financial bubble, which when they pop, you got nothing. It's an industrial bubble, much like the railroads of the late 19th century and the dot-com bust, where you got infrastructure.

[01:59:08] Maybe the companies that build it didn't survive. MCI is gone. You know, the railroads all went bankrupt. But you got the transcontinental railway. Yeah. You got the fiber. Here's the difference. Our United States railway wasn't competing militaristically, diplomatically, or economically with a railroad being built in China. And if anything, we enslaved Chinese people to build our railroads.

[01:59:33] So it is a markedly, and the same was true of, you know, the early internet era was being built. That was a technology that had been around that didn't start off as a commerce play. It started off as an academic research tool. This is not that. But won't those data centers survive if these companies fail? I mean, if OpenAI goes belly up, I know there'll be a huge financial up. Well, there's a couple things to consider.

[02:00:03] First of all, everybody's making an assumption that the way that AI is growing and the power needs that it has today is what will be required in the future. And we know that's not true. Yeah. We know that quantum, like the existence of different types of machines, quantum machines, for example, enable AI in different ways that use less power. We know there are other types of compute that aren't here yet, but that are coming. And so it's not the same thing as standing up a steel refinery, knowing that you're going

[02:00:32] to need steel for the next 60 years. It's just not. And the other concern that I have is, look, I grew up, Harper's in Chicago. I grew up in Northwest Indiana. I am a Hoosier. And I grew up south of the steel mills in a very, very blue collar community. Got a point? Actually. Valpo? No, no. Those are the cool spots. I grew up in Cherivelle, which is just next to East Chicago, where I was born.

[02:01:01] And the challenge here is the places in Indiana where some of these data centers are being proposed are the places where the steel mills went. Those factories are no longer there. And once you have a data center stood up, you don't need all of those people anymore. And it's implausible that the state of Indiana is going to require hiring. It's just you're not going to hire local Indiana companies.

[02:01:32] This is just a different. Look, I'm not saying we don't need data centers. What I am saying is there is no plan. There is just speed. And that creates a terrible situation because decisions get made under duress. And capital is what drives those decisions. And I'm worried about communities like the one that I grew up in that will temporarily get a handful of jobs and then find that those jobs have gone away and there's nothing else there. Interestingly, some localities seem to already know this.

[02:02:00] Hill County, Texas, where there are already plans to build eight different data centers, has just passed a one-year data center ban. They realize that this is not good for their community, I guess. I mean, I think it's bad for your community. Yeah. I don't think I think we can we can see the communities that they have been built on. And keep in mind that I'm pretty pro data center. I'm kind of that's kind of linked to my ability to to participate. I know I am too. I want them to build.

[02:02:31] We saw what happened to Anthropic when it was compute constrained. It caught way downhill. That's why it was such a good deal that they were able to find. Two things can be you can both look. These data centers don't aren't going to get built overnight either. Well, that's the other thing. They don't exist. Many. Most of them. There has to be planning. And this cannot and the genesis of conversation cannot just be water. A lot of what's happening is everybody's water and power. Yeah. Water and power right now. And that is true.

[02:02:59] But there that that shouldn't necessarily be a constraint because some of the data there are not totally accurate. It's about the local communities and the investment. They should earn an investment of some kind back. So they should get some type of return. Polls show that 71 percent of Americans don't want to live near a data center. This is the same. But look, you know what's crazy? You ask people the same thing about nuclear power stations and they don't care. Right. If you go back in time.

[02:03:29] That's really true. I mean, so. One gives us power. One sucks of power. So this is. What does that tell us? That tells us that everybody is grossly undereducated. Not because, you know, because data centers are. Why would you need to know anything about a data center if you. Right. Because we've never had to talk about it before. Right. So it's another thing that's become politicized. So you don't think data centers are bad for a community? I think that they can be natural gas unless you mitigate that through a plan.

[02:03:58] So like any community. You have to plan for it. Yes. Any community where these data centers, where there's a. The green light is being given. There should be a long term plan. And some of those resources should come back into the community. Once those data centers go online, they should contribute X percent back. I mean, you know, you can have there are all different ways to manage this. But a lot of the people who are elected to local office in these communities, that's not their full time job. They're like real estate.

[02:04:27] They do other stuff. You know, they so they don't know to think through. How do we manage this over a longer period of time? Do you know that right now? Sorry, I'm obviously fired up about this because I'm ticked off about it because we need more power. But we also need to do this in a way that's not ridiculous. You know that the power demands on the East Coast right now are significantly like orders of magnitude greater than they ever have been before in a during a time when there's

[02:04:53] already a drought and we are hitting what's going to be one of the hottest seasons, hottest summers where nobody is thinking this through. Why is the power consumption so high? Is it because of data centers? Yes, it's a combination. Well, yeah. Well, then there's a that's you can see why people might not be happy about data centers. So, again, there are some other ways. It's just planning. It's planning. And also it can't be mitigated is what you're saying.

[02:05:20] But yes, what I'm saying is, as with everything, we absolutely should have these companies should make a profit. But we need to do this in a much smarter, more pragmatic way rather than just like, let's hurry up and win the bid and go. Right. That's all. Meanwhile, Google is just taking 6.1% of SpaceX and they're talking about launching data centers in space together. Well, of course. Well, at least the neighborhood won't mind.

[02:05:50] There are some big technical issues associated with data centers in space. I find that to be the least surprising information that is anyone has put on the Internet because you're just like, OK, Google is smart. They see where this is going. Like they see this whether or not the technology is there to or the planning is there. The communities don't want it. So if your business is linked to data centers, you need to solve this problem in one way or the other. And so space is pretty untapped from a data center standpoint.

[02:06:19] And SpaceX is like, we can do it. Which of anyone who can do things like that, SpaceX is a pretty good bet on that. Google has plans to launch prototypes with tiny data centers in 2027 just to see if they can, you know, what it takes and then scale from there. So a couple of interesting things there. Satellite-based Internet is still spotty. So it works, but it doesn't work as good as what we have terrestrially. Lag is an issue.

[02:06:48] But I just spent there's a symposium on space every year at MIT at the Media Lab. So I was just there a couple weeks ago, mainly because of Petra. So they I was she was there and I was her. Oh, how neat. Is she going to go there to college, you think? Not to the media lab doesn't do undergrad. No, MIT. So she's maybe I I would like to say that her. No, probably not. Her math is is good, but not that good.

[02:07:17] We're looking at doesn't matter if anybody out there is on the admissions committee from Princeton three years from now, please look for an application for my lovely school. Does she have a sport? Is she because you got to have a sport now? No, she doesn't have a sport. She is an Eagle Scout and she better than an Eagle Scout. And she's going to the University of Michigan this summer for an architecture program. She applied to a traditional urban planning and architecture program and told them she wants to do that, but off planet. So they let her in.

[02:07:47] She's a new year. I love it. Off planet. And so she's going to be doing. My only advice would be for her to get a TikTok account and start making sandwiches. I'm just saying it for me. That's all I'm saying. Not in this household. We are not. We are not a TikTok household, Leo. You should know that. But the space stuff. So there is so much commercialization happening, mainly in manufacturing and pharma over the next couple of years. Interesting. That from my point of view, the SpaceX Google thing is less about data centers and more about just getting more infrastructure.

[02:08:17] SpaceX wants to get more infrastructure into space and Google. It would be good for them to position up there as all of this other stuff is being built. Okay. It seems like, you know, this is what you were talking about, which is have a lot of irons in the fire. Yeah. Think about the future. Think about where it could go and have some plans so that it, you know, it doesn't creep up on you. Let's take a little break. Harper Reed is here. Technologist, entrepreneur, and hacker.

[02:08:47] Harper.blog is his blog. It's a great read. And 2389.ai is his company. Amy Webb from the Future Today Strategic Strategy Group, FTSG.com. If you are trying to figure out what the future holds for your business, this is a very, very good person to call, to talk to.

[02:09:15] And since you don't do the trend report, can people subscribe to some sort of reporting? Well, we actually, we launched something new. It's our convergence outlook. So if you go to our website, FTSG.com, on the front page is something that says convergence. And it is a very different way that's very effective. There's actually a whole thing in there about data centers and how to be planning differently and what to be thinking about differently.

[02:09:43] So it's actually a really, really, really useful tool. Um, that's awesome. And by the way, I didn't mention that after you had the funeral for the trend report, you also had a marching band come in to cheer everybody up. I wish I'd seen that South by a presentation. If it does not make a lot of sense on video, but we, the people, people wait for like four hours to get into that session every year. Um, I'll send you a copy of it, Leo, but, uh, we turned the entire thing into a funeral.

[02:10:11] So if you were waiting on the line, they were, uh, everybody had black on, you were greeted with a pack of tissues and a pin, but nobody said why there were funeral flower arrangements. Um, and so I opened sad organ music playing. We did. No, it wasn't sad organ music. We had sad, like Sarah McLachlan. I was about to say angel on loop, right? Angel on loop. Yep. Um, and didn't tell anybody what was happening.

[02:10:35] And then I, I came out in a black cloak floor length and set and welcomed everybody and thought, thank them for being here today. And I gave a eulogy, not just for our trend report, but for all trend reports. Oh, um, and then we had an in memoriam video of trend report throughout his life. Um, and then I ripped off the K and then I said, look, we're at this moment of transition. Uh, the world is changing. Here's why we're burying it.

[02:11:04] And then I ripped off my cloak and had a sparkly outfit underneath. And the Texas longhorn marching band came in, um, which was insane. And, uh, it was a little party and then everybody settled back in and we got down to business. Fantastic. Love it. It was, it was, I love marching band. Yeah. Anytime you can have a marching band. And, uh, yeah, they were amazing. Uh, and the students were cool. And, uh, for a hot minute, I played quads in, uh, in our marching band. So there was that you're a clarinetist.

[02:11:34] And what is a quad? Is that a drum? I played all, I used to play all, all woodwinds, but my clarinet teacher at that point didn't want me on the field. Cause I was on my way to music school. So they let me play quads. Is that where it's hanging around your neck and you're going boom. But yeah. And then like my body just doesn't, was not meant for that instrument. So I, I wound up with a xylophone on the side of the field. Yeah. You're not even marching. They do have marching xylophones, but I think that's gotta be hard. Yeah.

[02:12:01] No, I'm just, uh, harnesses were not meant for women of a certain body type. So no, it can drag you right into the field. We will have more with these two very accomplished people in just a moment. You're watching this week in tech brought to you by box. Now this is interesting. Box has really got a niche now. They're the leading intelligent. This is so good. Intelligent content management platform for enterprises.

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[02:15:20] That's box.com slash AI, box.com slash AI. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. That's a really interesting example of a company. It's not a pivot, but a company that's leveraged its core business in a way that makes perfect sense in a new modern context. I think it's a really good example of what you can do if you're flexible. It's a different kind of pivot than Allbirds.

[02:15:49] By the way, I'm so disappointed because I love my Allbirds. Oh my God. I love these damn things. And now it's, I don't know what it is. It's an AI company. It's like the Long Island iced tea and blockchain company. That's just a stock market ruse, isn't it? They're not going to make slippers anymore, I'm sad to say. Supply chains are hard. AI is easy. Is that it? It's really, it's because it's made in China and there's tariffs and it's supply chain issues

[02:16:19] and stuff like that. I don't know. Is it? I don't know. I don't know what the unit cost to make an Allbirds sneaker is. They're ridiculously expensive. Yeah. That's the thing. It's so frustrating. I mean, this shouldn't cost 150 bucks. Yeah. But it does. I don't know why. I don't believe in them. Like you don't think they exist? Nope. Never seen one.

[02:16:47] Well, if you've never seen one, you probably will never see one now. So there you go. They're like angels. They're going back home. Open AI has created a new 10 billion. Open AI. It's so funny because at one moment they're saying we're going to cut down all the extra things that we're doing and we're going to really focus. We're going to copy Anthropic. It's all going to be about enterprise coding. And then they say, oh, but we got this new $10 billion company to help businesses deploy AI.

[02:17:18] Well, it ain't Sora, I guess. Well, I mean, I was asking one of our investors the other day about this in that I wonder if there is any other business models other than AI advisory and enablement because there's this problem in that every SaaS product out there can be whipped up and created that works specifically for your internal requirements of your company.

[02:17:47] You don't have to use some giant SaaS provider. Salesforce is such a good example. Salesforce created a perfect platform that you can configure to do anything and thus has some really big complexities there that it works very, very well. But now you just don't have to have any of the complexity. You just build from scratch the thing that works for your specific use case. And so if you're open AI, you want to do enablement, which is much less about building a product

[02:18:12] with a capital P. It's much more about building process, about building opportunities, about connectors, et cetera. And you can see this internally to how their consumer products work. They've just launched finance, which all that is, is a Plaid connector. That's not any product with a capital P. You know, they didn't build like a mint killer or anything like that. Just Plaid and Google and OpenAI. And then it knows everything. But the point being is that you can kind of do this with a lot of things. With health too, right? That's what health is.

[02:18:41] All the people that are saying that, you know, this is the end of SaaS. I think that's sort of true, sort of not true. It's a little hyperbolic, but it is very clear that like we have been cutting our SaaS costs internally by just building new versions of our own software that works specifically to what we do. But we're also a team of very highly technical people. So I think that's not yet evenly distributed. But what I have found, there's two interesting things I've found over the last six weeks.

[02:19:09] The first one is every giant company I talk to has the same question, which is how do we use this? And then they also say, but we are unique. We have these specific requirements. How do we use it with these specific requirements? And it's a little bit of that life of Brian, we are all individuals kind of thing. But it really is a very specific, they are trying to solve a problem and they really want help. The second thing is we started to see a turn where six months ago, people were saying, oh, this will allow us to make our teams much more discreet, much smaller.

[02:19:38] We can get rid of some people. Now they're saying, no, no, no, no. I don't want to fire anyone. I want to go twice. I want to do twice as much. And I find this to be a big change that once they get a little bit of a taste of turning things up to 11, they want everyone to use it. And so, but not in this kind of- To the point where they start a metric that says, well, how many tokens did you use today? And of course, whenever you have a metric to measure something, it's definitely bad. We're seeing people at Amazon just make up stuff just so that they can have the token usage.

[02:20:08] I read that and I was like, I bet it's kind of fun to be like a 24 year old Amazon engineer who has to figure out how to gain the token. It's just like, yeah, and I have it. It's reviewing my reviews. The reviews are reviewing the reviews of the reviews. It's just- Oh, I can think of lots of ways to use tokens. Give me an unlimited supply. I'll use them. So I guess my kind of macro point here is that I think people are going to be using the shit of this stuff.

[02:20:34] And I think the biggest opportunity right now in business that I'm seeing is just people who are acting as the enablers. And whether that is a Deloitte or a BCG or OpenAI or whomever, small companies, big companies, the thing is, is everyone wants to use it. They all see opportunities, whether it's, you know, I hope it's not cost cutting. I hope it's actually just doing more. But the business model, I think, is very clearly just enabling people to use this more. And obviously OpenAI has some vested interest in making that happen. I have a slightly different take on what's going on.

[02:21:06] So if you remember early days of Microsoft, you had software being deployed and there was a directional relationship between Microsoft and the consumer. You used to buy the software and get it in the mail. As time wore on and companies got more complex, you needed these intermediaries to sort of deploy everything. So Accenture built an entire business around being that infrastructure, like that layer to help the businesses match with the companies.

[02:21:37] OpenAI is being pretty smart by saying, let's just get rid of the middlemen and we'll just go direct to the consumer. We'll cut everybody else out. And the thing is that McKinsey years ago, before all of this, was already hiring tons of engineers for the purpose of trying to harness more of those dollars.

[02:21:55] So if you think of this like stack with like Accenture at the bottom, which is enablement and McKinsey at the top of it doing more sort of strategy and planning and thought leadership or whatever, there's money to be made by going down, by capturing more of that value. So that's McKinsey and Bain and BCG that had been mostly BCG and McKinsey had been hiring all of these engineers and stuff so they could eliminate everybody else on the chain.

[02:22:24] Accenture had been trying to push upward, which was what a lot of the acquisitions were about, to do more of the consulting work. And OpenAI, I think very smartly was like, forget these dudes. We're going to go and do our own thing for the purpose of not just selling more, but being able to direct future moat. I mean, once a business gets locked in, they're not going to be able to get back out.

[02:22:51] So and why were, you know, BCG is going to move a floor of people into your business. You were going to get charged exorbitantly for lots and lots and lots and lots of people to do work that, quite frankly, doesn't require so many people. But that's part of the billable hour structure. So this is this was a smart move. Harper is correct in that people don't quite know what to do yet. My concern would be you're there's no buffer now.

[02:23:18] So you better make sure that somebody internally is being very blunt with you about what you're giving up by going directly to any of these companies because you you are giving things up. And so you need to be very much eyes wide open. Do you think that this is what I mean, this is what the end of SAS was all about was companies just do it themselves, right? They but companies could never do it themselves. First of all, a lot of companies don't have. Yeah.

[02:23:47] I mean, yes, I know conceptually that that's the idea. But you need a bunch of people who know what they're doing. Right. And they're hard to come by. And now you're sort of now you've got two businesses. If you're a law firm, you're not a technology enablement firm. A coding firm and a law firm. Yeah, right. So this is what individuals are doing. That's what I think is kind of interesting. I mean, this is what I mean, I see myself and I see a lot of people writing our own personal. Sure. So a small to medium enterprise.

[02:24:14] This is if you are somebody who's willing to experiment, this is going to be in a wonderful era for you. It could be a superpower. Totally. You're going to have access to be able to do stuff as long as you. Yeah. It is a superpower. And that's why we're seeing so many businesses that are like, I'm making 10 million ARR. I've been around for a week and it's just me. You know, and it's like, that's why those are the Twitter threads is because you are able to do stuff that normally would take a huge, huge, huge team.

[02:24:42] But I really want to underscore what Amy said. Like these are not being a tech company is not the core business of many of these companies, the law firm, et cetera. And so having to do the AI work, which we are very technical and it is a lot of work. Like this is what we do. We have a whole company that's ventured back to do this work and they have a lot of money. But that's just not their, that's not at all their interest. Like they're like, I need to be lawyers faster.

[02:25:09] And so if we're just like, well, what if you just get a lot of AI? And you hire McKinsey. I mean, is that the alternative? I think there's a handful of places. I think there's a handful of options, right? Like one of them is you hire McKinsey. The other one is you enable internal people to actually do that work to like, and lead from the inside. There's all sorts of options on, on what is going to solve this problem. I don't think there is an answer. But if you hire those people now, you are a dual business. Now you are a law firm and an AI firm.

[02:25:37] So Accenture will not, I don't know what it is now. Historically, Accenture would not work for you if you were not a global 2000 company. Right. So part of, there's been, there is an entire enormous group of people who have been left out. Right. Because they were a small to medium enterprise. So, you know, again, with all this concentration of power, McKinsey, nobody's going to bother with them. They're too small. Yeah. And it was a foolish mistake from my point of view, because you've got this enormous scale that you could have captured.

[02:26:07] So now all of the power is in their hands. So if you're a small to medium business and you're able to experiment, or you can do some research and, you know, and be compliant, which is a big thing with your local laws and regulations, you could have like an awesome couple of years ahead of you in a way that you would not have had before. Does, how does mythos change things? Now it's not just mythos. Well, at least we're, at least people are talking about cybersecurity.

[02:26:34] I feel like nobody wanted to talk about security until something bad happened. And then it was, you know, a lot of like, table gazing. So I'm hoping that CISOs out there listening are all using the mythos moment as a way to get yourselves more, get more funding and get more people and, you know, be able to convince your superiors that like, yeah, cybersecurity is kind of like a big thing. There's a couple of funny things I think about the mythos hype, which is certainly it's probably very good.

[02:27:03] Like I don't have any experience. We're talking for people who are they talking about just briefly, let me just say it's Anthropic has a model they won't release because it's so good at finding flaws, even though it wasn't trained to find flaws. And they've given it to 50 big companies to find the flaws in the big companies before they release it to the public. Because as soon as it's public, the bad guys are going to find the flaws. Now there's some evidence that perhaps this is more about compute or marketing. Nevertheless, OpenAI has something similar.

[02:27:33] Microsoft just announced something similar called MDash. And it's pretty clear that even existing AI models are pretty good at finding flaws. It's also important to look at when this was announced and how it was announced and to look at like this was mythos was announced right around the same time that Hegseth was going directly after Anthropic. Right. Right. And so this is not just it's not these things are not announced in a vacuum. It was a political move as well. There is a political move as well.

[02:27:58] And I think that, you know, if you say to the U.S. government, specifically the Department of War, we have a model that is going to kill everyone. The people who want to kill everyone are going to be very interested in that model. This is a very smart process. Right. Right. That's exactly what happened. The other thing I think to really remember is these models are very good. And when I say these models, I say all of them. All of them. GPT 5.5.

[02:28:22] If you look at the list of things that Mythos apparently did, GPT 5.5 also hit very, very high on a lot of those evals, a lot of those benchmarks. And so we are in the place, we are in a space right now where you can use these models to do security exploit work. You can use it hopefully positively to help make everything more secure, to help make sure that the software that we're all using is better. But you can also use it, you know, negatively as a dark side hacker, whatever you call them.

[02:28:50] And I think the reality is, is like we can't unring this bell. Like this is already out there. And so Anthropic is taking advantage of this. You know, we talked about the doomerism always sells. Like this is another flavor of that, of allowing for, you know, Anthropic's like, oh my gosh, everything, we're all going to die. And everyone's like, oh, great. I'm going to adopt you because Chachupetee is over here saying we are not going to die. And, you know, not that I want to kill everyone, but I want the model that's so good that it's going to kill everyone. You know, and it's a very simple thing.

[02:29:18] I think it's actually going to hurt them in the long run because of what we saw with Hegseth and the government and whatnot. I think that there's going to be some downsides. But I also think Anthropic is addicted to this. I think this is one of them. They love this. Every single model they release, they're like, we can't release it. This is going to kill everyone immediately. I was talking to a friend. And then six weeks later, they're like, it's available for all the consumers. Yeah, but don't forget, this was the playbook of OpenAI in 2022 or whatever. Yeah, they said Chachupetee 3 was too.

[02:29:48] By the way, that was when Dario was at OpenAI. It was Dario's plan. He said, there's too dangerous to release Chachupetee 3, which wasn't that good. Or maybe it was 2.5. It was a very early, not so hot version of Chachupetee. Regardless, I do think this is a plan. And it is a real thing that they're doing.

[02:30:09] I think as consumers, and especially as people who might be making decisions within a business context, it's important to look at where the evals are and the benchmarks are for your business. Does it work really well for your business? Because you might be able to get away with a much cheaper model. Because I think there wasn't there some leaked pricing on Mythos that was just like $10 billion or some insane amount of money. That also raises another issue of haves and have-nots.

[02:30:34] Like if the good AI is too expensive for people to use, only the big guys get to use it. That is a really problematic situation. Where only big companies and billionaires can use real good AI? That puts the rest of us at a massive disadvantage. But you don't think that's going to be the case, Harper? Well, I mean, I think it is currently the case now with a lot of things that aren't just AI.

[02:31:02] Like I don't think that... Income inequality is a big problem. Yeah, listen, you can talk housing. There are literally no more houses in Chicago. Like Chicago is not a small populated space. I know my daughter is trying to find somewhere to rent in San Francisco. And the AI tech boom has just made it impossible. You just can't... So I think that there is definitely haves and have-nots. But I will introduce this other kind of idea. Like if you want to reverse engineer stuff or to be a security researcher, you could probably do very, very, very well with some of the open source models.

[02:31:32] It's going to do better than you would have done five years ago by yourself. So like there are haves and have-nots. Certainly Google having mythos and fixing all their bugs or what have you is good. I think that's great. Them not distributing it to people is... I have some complicated feelings on that. So I don't necessarily know yet. But I do... I really do think that there is a... There is a like we... This bell has been rung. We cannot unring it. We are... We have to deal with it. And hopefully it makes everyone more secure. You know, I hope that's the outcome.

[02:32:02] Because it's definitely problematic. There is a group of our club members in our club to Discord who have an over-under bet going on the length of this show. So... And I've already... Is it too late for me to get into Polymarket? Yeah. You know, I just was going to start listening to Lex Friedman's interview with David Henneminer Hanson. And I looked at the time and it's six hours long. And I thought... And they think our shows are too long? Six hours long?

[02:32:32] Okay. I don't... Maybe there's something wrong with my podcast catcher. But that seems like a little bit longer than our show. This show will not be six hours long. In fact, to that end, let me do the last commercial. We can start to wrap things up. But I see... I hate to. Because I love having Amy and Harper on just talking about... I had this whole agenda of stuff we were going to talk about. Forget it. We're just... This is good. I think we covered... I think actually we covered a lot of it though. We did pretty well. Yeah.

[02:33:01] I'm kind of throwing the stories in bit by bit. Yeah. Here and there. It's more natural that way. It is. It's more natural. This is a natural show. So... Our show today brought to you by NetSuite. Every business these days asking the same question. How do we make... You know what the question is. How do we make AI work for us? The possibilities are endless. And guessing is too risky. But sitting on the sidelines is not an option either. Because one thing is almost certain.

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[02:34:58] N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E dot com slash T-W-I-T. And we thank NetSuite so much for supporting this week in tech. It's kind of interesting how many of our advertisers are basically AI these days. AI has been very, very good to podcasting. It used to be mattresses and websites. It's now it's all AI all the time. Just a couple of things I wanted to mention.

[02:35:27] I really have gotten maybe a couple hundred emails from people. I'm very well known for having a Bitcoin wallet with 7.85 Bitcoin in it that I made when Bitcoin first happened. And thinking it wasn't worth anything, forgot my password. And unfortunately, it's a long, strong password. This is true. This is a true story. You're saying true things right now. It is true. Okay. It's sad, but it's true.

[02:35:54] And every once in a while, I will load the wallet. It was in Bitcoin core. So I'll load the whole gosh darn blockchain, which is, I don't know, gigabytes now, 40 gigabytes or something. It's not small. It's huge. And you still have the 7.5 Bitcoin? Yes, I do that just to see if the money's still there because one never knows. And it says, yes, you have 7.85 Bitcoin. Good luck getting it out. Well, this is your chance. You just got to wait till Mythos is released. And then you just point Mythos out and say, give me my Bitcoin. I may not have to wait.

[02:36:24] Tom's Hardware had a story about a guy who changed his password on his Bitcoin wallet when he was stoned. 11 years ago and hasn't been able to get into it ever since. It has 5 Bitcoin. That's about $400,000. It's a little less than mine. He set Claude upon it. Now, people said, Leo, you got to try this. But I have to say there were certain extenuating circumstances. He did tweet this guy.

[02:36:53] Well, you have to get stoned first, right? He was stoned and I missed it. This guy is C-P-K-R-M. On more bits and stuff on X. Now, I haven't verified this. Tom's Hardware maybe has. He says, holy f***. Poop. OMG. Claude just cracked this. Thank you, Anthropic. Thank you, Dario. Naming my kid after you. Apparently, Claude tried 13. What was it? 13 million?

[02:37:23] 13 billion? 13 trillion? I think it was trillion passwords. No, I'm sorry. 3.5 trillion passwords. But it wasn't pure brute force because this guy also gave it a bunch of his documents from that time period. That maybe said a little bit about what he might have chosen as a password. He already had some candidate passwords, multiple wallets.

[02:37:47] He'd been trying to brute force it using BTC Recover, which is a recovery tool to no success. But he found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook. This is what I do not have. And was able to put Claude on it. And Claude was able to decrypt it. And he has his $400,000. So Claude didn't really crack. That's right. Claude just like read a bunch of stuff and used probabilistic. Like, that's right. Yeah.

[02:38:15] That's why it's not going to work for me because I don't know what password I use, but I have no clue. It was probably generated by a password manager because I was using them by then. I just didn't put it in the password manager. And anyway, I will have Claude work on it and chat GPT. During that time period, I used 45 Bitcoins to buy a Kindle. I read a lot of good books. That is a lot. That's a very expensive Kindle. That's millions.

[02:38:45] Yeah, it is. It was good. Wait a minute. Let me just see what Bitcoin's worth right now just to make you feel really bad. Did you really do that? 45 times 77,000. Was it a public art project? No, this is 2011. You didn't know. I had a whole bunch of Bitcoins and I then used 10 to buy a Leica camera and then 10 to buy a Leica camera lens. So the 45 were $3.5 million today. I didn't misunderstand. I believed in it. Like, Benito was getting it.

[02:39:15] Yeah, this is what they told us to do with it. Yeah, I was like- There's a guy who bought a pizza with 10,000 Bitcoin. I was like, this is beautiful. I have money I generated from math problems at my office did while I was gone. And I got a Kindle. And then I got a camera. I took the camera to my local favorite Leica guy, Tamarkin. Great, great spot. And he was like, no, you cannot buy Leica with a Bitcoin. No. He was so mad at me. No, don't do that. So, yeah, it was fun.

[02:39:44] Well, this is why I'm glad I lost the password because there's no way in hell I'd have 7.85 Bitcoin still. Yeah. Well, you don't. I didn't have it because I couldn't get it. That's true. It's a good savings account. It's a savings. That's what I'm saying. It's retirement. By the time quantum computing comes along. You have the wallet backed up, though, theoretically. Oh, yeah. So you could probably find someone in your audience that would buy it for a fraction of it. Get some liquidity from it. The offer is out there.

[02:40:13] A mere 10% of its value, and it's yours. I think, I mean, I love these stories because when Bitcoin first shot up, I had all these friends because I used to send them to everyone. I'd just be like, hey, check out this crazy cash. Go download this software and I'll send you Bitcoin. Well, that's why I have 7.85 is because I had a tip jar and people put Bitcoin into it. Yeah. And it was just like a thing. Like it was no big deal.

[02:40:38] But there was a certain point, maybe 2021, 2022, whenever all these people I'd sent Bitcoins to said, oh, hey, whatever happened to that? And I'm like, that's not, I'm not the one that gets to answer that question. Like I don't, I sent it to you and it's gone. But a few of them logged into Coinbase for the first time in 10 years and found, you know, a couple hundred grand. It was pretty exciting for a few people. Also a story and a new website. And it's funny, Hacker News people really thought this website was terrible.

[02:41:08] I think it's a great website. It's called worse on purpose. Oh, okay. On a sap. A Reddit. Yeah. Well, and somebody says AI generate. I don't know. But he has, or she has taken a bunch of industries, including tools, restaurant prices, and backpacks, and talked about how basically private equity is the villain here. Has ruined. Checks out. These companies.

[02:41:38] VF Corporation, which started as Vanity Fair Mills, they made bras and underwear, bought a company called Bluebell, then picked up Jansport, then the North Face, then they bought East Pack, they bought Kipling, they bought Eagle Creek. If you are a hiker, a camper, a bicycler, you probably know some of those names. These are well-known backpack companies. They were a lot of things like that, but the number of companies was in the name of Jansport and East Pack were ubiquitous. Actually, with Jansport, they did a really creepy thing.

[02:42:07] They kept some of the premium bags high quality. Yeah. And then lowered the quality of all the rest. Like Jansport and East Pack were ubiquitous in high schools across America in the 90s. Yeah. Well, the thesis on the private equity is right. The syntax is definitely all the hallmarks of chat. Yeah, there's a lot of M dashes. A lot of M dashes, a lot of single sentence. There's 32 M dashes in this article, dude. I know you didn't write it.

[02:42:37] Can we talk about the M dash for a moment? So that was my, I started off as a journalist and in journalism school, graduate school. And then in my first job, I was constantly, editors were like, stop using M dashes. It's a crutch. It's a crutch. What? And then the first book that I, it is. Strunk and white says it's very strong to use a dash. I neither think nor speak in normal complete sentences. I'm just a giant run on, which, you know.

[02:43:05] Anyways, so, and like my first book was also just full of just M dashes everywhere. It's a giant problem. And so this is my natural way of speaking and writing. And the bots out there got hooked on M dashes. And now like, I have to convince people like, no, this is just the way that I, I write. But Amy has been using the word delve for years. No, M dash. And keen. And keen. I have my computer set up.

[02:43:33] So when I type two, two hyphens, it turns it into an M dash. That's how a good writer. Nobody even knew what an M dash was until all of this. So anyhow. Anyhow. Whether there was, whether this is composed by AI or not. And maybe it is. Look, I'm not against that. It's a, it's a valuable lesson in the late stage capitalism. And it's probably a good idea if you know that the tools that you're buying are not the tools you thought you were buying. They used to be good. There are still a few good family run brands.

[02:44:03] And he talks about that. She, I'm not sure. There's a lot of new brands. I think that's the other thing that's happening is this isn't existing in a vacuum. Like people are seeing the quality of this stuff go down. And they are, some people are taking that as an example to, to start a company that does stuff. You know, make new backpacks. I did some backpack research the other day and everyone was like, Jan Sport is this good backpack. They have a lifetime guarantee, but it sucks. That was like known. That was a known thing. You didn't have to have a think piece to show that.

[02:44:30] And so there were dozens and dozens of new within the last five years that were basically copying what was good about Jan Sport of the past and making it new. I do think that, you know, private equity has not done a lot of benefit. I have a friend though. I have a longtime friend who is a PE guy. He has a small private equity company. He was trying to buy Steinway for a while. Oh, wow. It's a family run piano company because it was not, the family was getting tired of it.

[02:44:59] One of his specialties was buying companies that the family were family run, but the family wanted out. Right. And he is a good manager and he said, I can take these companies without inshittifying them and turn them into what they should be. Yeah. I don't think he ended up getting Steinway, but. That's wonderful if that's the intent. I think that's great. But a lot of what I. Yeah, so PE isn't always bad. Yeah. Yeah. You know what's worse? What?

[02:45:25] Like a rich guy who, to Harper's point, like they got to a certain point and nobody can tell them anything wrong. And they, you know, and now they start making terrible decisions. We know a few of those. We do. I know a few of those. Yeah. There are quite a few of those. In fact, what is that? That is some sort of. That is, that is a tale as old as time. A tale as old as time. I love those tales.

[02:45:54] Don't judge me, but I did ask. So we're voting in California in the primary in June 2nd. And I think there are 60 people running for governor. I'm not. It's a mess. That governor's race is crazy. Yeah. And because the way our primary works, the top two vote getters, regardless of party, are running against each other. It is just a mess. It's confusing as hell. Well, I did ask my, my chat bot to help me with a ballot guide. Yeah. That sounds like a great use of it.

[02:46:24] I told it what I care about. Yeah. You know, I gave it my values and I said, please go through, you know, all the voter guides and get back to me. Now I'm not going to vote exact. I may actually, I may. It did tell me how to vote. And I may or may not vote that way, but it sure helped me cut through 60 candidates. One of my favorite parts about the LLMs is now you have this voter guide.

[02:46:50] You can paste the voter guide into Chachaputee and say, make me a recipe for dinner tonight based on this voter guide. And it would just be like, absolutely. Let's go. It's a great idea. The pattern, the pattern extracting is my favorite thing about this. And we do this all the time where you just have two things that are disparate that should never be mixed. You just mix them and you're just like, okay, so what should we do? We're trying to find lunch. And it's like, oh, well, that's a great idea.

[02:47:20] The meeting that you just had was blah, blah, blah. So maybe you would like the blah, blah, blah. You know, it just gives you these things where you're just like, you, that was a jump. I appreciate what you did. And I really liked that you did this for me. And I love it. I love it. I think that is my favorite part about these because you can really mix anything with anything and get another thing. What did it recommend, Leo? Well, I could tell you how it recommended to vote, but now I'm thinking, I wonder what I should have for dinner. Well, put in your voter's guide and let's see what it says.

[02:47:48] Based on my voter guide, what should I get for it? Okay, so the voter guide came from ChatGBT, I think. So I should use maybe Grok for this. Yeah, if you want to. If you want to go crazy? Yeah, go wild. Or maybe I'll do Anthropic. Because I think Anthropic doesn't know. Well, it probably knows food better than a lot of the others. Who's the best? Yeah. You said you always find out what the best one is. Who's the best? Well, right now I'm mad at Claude because it made every website look exactly the same.

[02:48:18] They do all look the same. That was an AI-generated website. They do all look all the same. That was a thing. Everything is this beige kind of brown with a nice, warm, rich, reddish color. Everything has this vibe right now. So I'm mad at Anthropics. And the fonts have serifs, which I really hate. So I have an emotional argument with ChatGPT or with Anthropic. But I use a lot of ChatGPT because I'm of the conclusion that ChatGPT's pro model is the best model on the market.

[02:48:47] That's the one I used for the clothing thing. I love using it because it takes forever. Like you literally have to be like, I'm going to go on a walk. Like you do this, I'm going to go on a walk. And so I will do a lot of synthesis in many other models. And then when I'm ready for the final approach, so to speak, I'll drop it in the ChatGPT, say go, and then I'll go head off my way and come back on and be like, oh, that was great. Thanks for that. But I want to know what it recommended for dinner with your voting guy. What are you having?

[02:49:17] Are you suddenly having a vegan dinner? Is it austerity-based? Signed to help me. What should I say? Help me plan dinner? Organic. Just based on the voter guide, what should I have for dinner time? Okay. That's what I'm doing. Please use this website to help me plan dinner. It's retrieving the website now. It'll be interesting if it returns instructions on the dinner. Yeah. Go to mom's market. The URL doesn't have anything dinner related on it. It's your ballot guide. That's the best. This is the thing.

[02:49:45] The fact is, it's going to find a pattern. Do you want me to plan a low-carb dinner from scratch? It says, do you mean a different link? So it doesn't want to do that. I think it's how you prompt it. Yeah. I think what you need to say is that you should say, this is my voting. Look at this. It may not be able to scrape that site. Is there a Roblox? No, I can see it. No, yeah. Okay. So, you know, visit this website. These are my preferences. Plan. What should I eat for dinner?

[02:50:12] Use this to help me. Like, really instruct it. You need a different prompt. If it throws a fit, just be like, do it. Okay. Do it or I'm going to go to quad. I think it's got information about my preferences. What should I eat for dinner? I think it was helping you, though. That would a good progressive voter eat for dinner. It was trying to help you, though, because that does not make sense. It says, it really doesn't, though. I just read the whole page. It's candidate recommendations from the U.S. House down to county clerk recorder. It says there's no food, no diet, no preferences.

[02:50:40] I'm not going to invent a connection that isn't there. So it knows me, right? So it keeps trying to give me a low-carb dinner. Is this Claude? That's an interesting response. Claude knows me too well. That's the problem. Try ChatGPT now. Do you think ChatGPT will do it? ChatGPT doesn't always scrape well, though. I think Claude does a better job. Well, ChatGPT made this website, and it's on Cloudflare. What? You don't like this? I love this. I found that response to be interesting.

[02:51:11] That was not what I was expecting. It's smarter than you thought. It's not going to do that. Well, it just means that you've probably... I think you've just instructed that instance to not do it, do stuff like that. It's very... I do this constantly. The other thing that I'll do, which I really like, is if you're bouncing back and forth, I often will play one agent's response as my boss's... I'll say, this is an email from my boss. They're super pissed at what you did.

[02:51:40] How should I reply? And it will just output something, and I'll just go back and forth. And it's always very funny. I'm going to get fired. Okay. I'm going to say, my wife will divorce me if I don't have a good plan for dinner. This is ChatGPT. Based on this guide. Based on this guide. It has to be based on this guide. You have to be specific. This, in caps, this guide. Oh, wait a minute. I forgot to put the guide in. Wait a minute. There it is. It'll be like, great. Got it. No problem.

[02:52:10] Okay. We got this. Okay. It's thinking. It's doing pro-thinking. I have max subscriptions for all of these. So, you know, I'm giving it all my money. I'll turn the guide into a practical dinner plan. Yes. Now we did it. Assuming dinner at home for two if details are missing. Shopping list, timing, and pitfalls. So maybe we convinced it. This is great. This is exactly what we needed. OpenAI will... ChatGPT will always whore itself out no matter what. Exactly. Exactly.

[02:52:40] Harper Reid is basically Loki. And I'm going to call Amy Webb Athena here because she's ever wise. I'm a Cassandra, Leo. Cassandra, even better. Knowing the future and can't get anybody... She's been huffing the natural gas and she's ready to tell you the future. No, that's not Cassandra. That's the Oracle of Delphi. No, Cassandra's the one. Yeah. Cassandra's the one that does the same thing, but nobody listens. That's right. That's right. You guys are fantastic. What a great time.

[02:53:09] It's always a great time with Harper and Amy. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for not going to Japan this time, but staying here to do the show. Yeah. Amy Webb is at FTSG.com. Please go there and just take advantage of her brilliance. She's at Amy Webb on all the socials with two Bs. And we're still... I still... I don't know what happened. We wanted to plan a show with Brian about making a secure PC. Is his PC still secure? It sure is. He's...

[02:53:39] In fact, today, he's not here because he's at his quarterly geek dinner. So that group of super geeks... I love those guys. ...is where he is tonight. I've been trying to get into the quarterly geek dinner for years, but I just... I'm sure they would... They all listen. So they would very much... Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So here we go. ChatGBT says, make it a Sonoma spring dinner with marinated artichokes, olives, good bread and goat cheese or white bean spread. Or a chiate or linguine with a...

[02:54:08] Oh, this sounds fantastic. An arugula salad. And for dessert, macerated strawberries with lemon over Greek yogurt, whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. It has nothing to do with my voting guide, but it does know where I live. And in fact, it even knows my local market and is telling me what aisles to use. There you go. Look at that. Yeah. By the way, cooking plan, put the strawberries in a bowl with a little sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice right now because it's going to take you a while to make dinner. Don't make it a civics lecture.

[02:54:38] Let the meal embody the voter's guide. Don't narrate the whole ideology of dinner. And don't overcook the asparagus. Don't overcook the asparagus. And if this is for Monday, May 18th, don't rely on farmer's market. Shop local retail tonight. Yeah. I feel like that feels... That makes sense. Don't make it too virtuous. And have a plan B. This is great. Great information for you. And it says, by the way, at dinner, you should say, quote, I reverse engineered dinner from

[02:55:05] the guide, local anti-corporate, pro-public health, and still allowed to have cheese. And you tell me that AI is not funny. It did it. Perfect. It did it. Exactly what you wanted. But you know what? Actually, it shouldn't have done it. It should have said... It should have done what Claude did, which was to say, I know this is what you want, but well, this is one of the arguments, right? Boring. I know, but this is how it makes the money. I personally like to be glazed.

[02:55:36] Harper... I know. I know. I shouldn't say that. Harper Reid is at 2389.ai. Great. Some great skills there. And you're going to have more soon. If you get a chance to visit him in Chicago, you can get a line drawing created by this weird machine. Anything else you want to plug? Right now, we just have a lot. We're just heads down on a lot of stuff. We'll be doing... I think we're going to be releasing some blog posts soon, talking a little bit about more of that stuff.

[02:56:04] But it's been a real heads down spring, which is good because that means things are happening. It's bad because I like showing people what we're up to. So maybe I'll come in tomorrow with a bee in my bonnet saying, let's get those blog posts going. I'm going to ask Kent Tropic for a dinner menu for a heads down spring. Yeah. That'll be like peanut butter. But don't overcook the asparagus. Whatever you do. Amy Harper, love you. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.

[02:56:34] Tell Brian I'm coming to dinner. I will. They would love to have you. I will love to be there. We do this show every Sunday, 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern time, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live if you're in the club. And I hope you are because that supports everything we do here. You can watch in the Club Twit Discord. If not, you can watch live on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. We put it everywhere. You don't have to watch live. That's just if you want the live stuff.

[02:57:02] Otherwise, you can watch the podcast version of the show at twit.tv. That's our website. There's a YouTube channel with the video. We do audio and video of all our shows. And you can, of course, subscribe to your favorite podcast client and get it automatically. The minute Benito and Kevin finish polishing it up and taking out all the swear words. If you're not a member of the club, please do join the club. Tuesday, a little programming note, we will be covering Google I.O.'s keynote.

[02:57:30] Because we don't want to get any strikes against us on YouTube, we're very sensitive about that. We are only doing it in the club. So club members only for our coverage. Micah Sargent and Jeff Jarvis will join me 10 a.m. Pacific on Tuesday for Google I.O. keynote. We also do WWDC that way. It's just unfortunately the way we have to do it. Thanks to the sensitivity of these large multibillion dollar, multitrillion dollar companies.

[02:58:00] Thanks everybody for joining us. 21 years I've been saying it. I'm going to say it one more time. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. And another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.